Towards Deeper Understanding of User Experience with Ubiquitous Computing Systems: Systematic Literature Review and Design Framework

Over the past decades, a plethora of innovative ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) systems have been constructed. The acceptance of the systems, however, depends on how users experience them in real contexts. While many of the ubicomp research projects include some form of user study, there is no overview of how user experience (UX) is approached in ubicomp research. To this end, we conducted a systematic literature review of ubicomp UX studies. Our findings reveal that users‘experiences with ubicomp systems have often been investigated in rather lightweight ways, for example by addressing basic usability issues, collecting ratings by simple, predetermined scales, or producing descriptions of general experiences such as fun and trust. Based on the findings we argue that a deeper and more fine-grained understanding of user experience would help developing more successful ubicomp systems. We propose a ubicomp UX framework that can help design and evaluate ubicomp systems with a desirable set of target experiences.