Section: New Results

Multidisciplinary Research For Supporting User Oriented Innovation

Usability Design and Evaluation Methods

Participants : Dominique Scapin, Yves Lechevallier, Pascal Marie-Dessoude, Claudia Detraux.

We pursued our work on articulation of usage mining approach and human factors expertise for the design and evaluation of information systems. Namely, collaborative clustering techniques were used to analyze data issued from users via a card sorting technique, with respect to an a priori ("expert") clustering. Considering the difficulties that people have in managing large information sets in their everyday life, for either professional or non-professional purposes (administration, social relationships, leisure, etc.), our recent research focusses on personal information space for which information bits are currently scattered many places.

In this PIMs field, there is little research with a user-centric approach, with the view that users-based knowledge might help specifying computer-based tools and a state-of-the-art [37] showed little work specifically on usability. Studies address a variety of questions from user needs to accessibility (including studies on older people) or user acceptance, among others. In the context of user-centered and long-term studies to understand the evolution of user information practice, we looked in a study at the intuitive way people organize their personal information, with or without computer systems, in order to help the design of future systems. Also, we recently surveyed 15 tools that claim to support personal information management.

Living Lab Landscape

Participants : Marc Pallot, Brigitte Trousse, Bernard Senach, Dominique Scapin.

In order to provide to the research community a comprehensive landscape of research streams in the Living Lab domain, we launched a study on the state-of-the-art about the ubiquitous notion of User Experience. During this continuous study, a landscape [34] , [69] has progressively emerged that we organized through 4 main axes: focus granularity (individual/group), user’s role in the design process (observed subject/value creator), collaboration style (structured/unstructured), and evaluation purpose (reliability/adoptability). Our landscape of research streams has been used by Finnish colleagues who conducted an empirical study on the use of the Living Lab research domain landscape as a tool for assessing the maturity level of 16 Finnish Living Labs [36] . The Living Lab research domain Landscape has allowed the study team to identify four categories of Living Labs.

Future Internet Domain Landscape

Participants : Marc Pallot, Brigitte Trousse, Bernard Senach.

There are many different Internet research areas and corresponding technologies that were already investigated, experimented and progressively deployed such as peer-to-peer, autonomous, cognitive and ad hoc networking, that have already demonstrated how to improve network performance and user experience. Peer-to-peer networking for large-scale distributed systems and widely used applications has proved both the feasibility and economic potential for delivering services to millions of users. Others emerged more recently in the context of the future Internet (FI), such as Cloud Computing for transparently sharing among users scalable elastic resources over a limitless network. As it remains difficult to visualise the conceptual evolution and articulate the various Internet research areas, we conducted a study for identifying the appropriate concepts that could populate the FI domain landscape [69] , [71] over three different periods of time (1990-1999, 2000-2005 and 2006-2011). Several INRIA research teams are involved in FIRE (Future Internet Research Experimentation) Testbed projects, namely: PlanetLab, OneLab, TEFIS, SensLAB, and BonFIRE whose scientific leaders were interviewed during the development of the FI domain landscape. Four dimensions were used for landscaping the Future Internet research domain: evolution approaches (from incremental evolution design to Clean Slate re-design or radical evolution), Internet routing (from the basic data packet delivery towards more sophisticated content distribution and retrieval capacities such as content Centric Networking), network type (from wired communication to wireless communication networks), evolution trend (from computer network towards network computing). The resulting tentative landscape of FI research areas shown in Figure 1 is intended to provide a faster and broader understanding of the different Internet research streams and related topics.

Figure 1. Future Internet Landscape

Future of Internet and User-open innovation for Smart Cities

Participants : Caroline Tiffon, Marc Pallot, Brigitte Trousse, Bernard Senach.

The goal of the Fireball project is to bring together three different constituencies: user driven open innovation, Future Internet, and Smart Cities [34] , [39] . It aims at defining a roadmap [29] , based on analysis of needs, opportunities and gaps, to benefit a wide scale implementation of the methodologies and concepts elaborated. A first objective in the project was to get a clear picture of the state-of-the-art in each domain. During the review, progressively emerges a landscape [69] that we organized along 4 main axes: wiring (wired/wireless), user's role (subject/actor), Internet evolution approach (structured/unstructured), evaluation purpose (reliability/adoptability). A large variety of FI research have been engaged. If initial efforts in Future Internet research have been directed towards the goal of providing the technical infrastructure supporting the next network generation, a rising trend in this research field is to consider now a higher level layer, the layer of services.

Method and Tool for Selection of Open Innovation Software Tools

Participants : Mylène Leitzelman, Brigitte Trousse.

In spite of an important number of tools supporting open innovation, there is few comparative evaluation and no grid or evaluation criteria helping to choose a product. A 2011 review in the Computer Aided Innovation field  (Hüsig, University Regensburg & Khon, Otto Beisheim School of Management) provides a large overview of available tools in relation with a wide range of innovation cycle features. This useful top-down categorization approach is of little help to choose a specific tool. To find the best OI tool supporting idea exchanges among a community of participants, we built an exploratory method on the Web and we elaborate an assessment grid of OI tools based on the QSOS method which is a method designed to qualify, select and compare free and open source software in an objective, traceable and argued way. It publicly available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. In our QSOS method, evaluation criteria are organized in a tree-hierarchy grid with, a scoring method procedure of each tree-leaf criteria (from 0 - not covered to 2 - completely covered). To achieve the construction of the OI tools criteria assessment grid (first step), we used different mining tools for Web crawling, network analysis, criteria classification and from the 29 top rated OI tools, we finally selected 6 of them from which we extracted the tree-map categorization used to build the reference software criteria sheet. In the following steps, after appropriate weighting, we used the provided OS3 Web application and we were able to compare 4 top selected OI tools [31] .

To support our method, we developed a QSOS-based OI Grid for supporting the OI tool selection. The QSOS Grid to compare OI tools, which is in an XML format, has been translated into a MindMap. As a first mock-up, the QSOS Web Interface O3S will be installed at the beginning of 2012 on our server. For the future, we will extend our own QSOS comparative method to other softwares and to other categories interesting for the Living Lab community.

Figure 2. Radar Positioning of Selected Open Innovation Tools

Extension of Methods for Idea Generation Process

Participants : Anne-Laure Negri, Caroline Tiffon, Bernard Senach, Brigitte Trousse.

Internet of Things (IoT) is supposed to be a physical world where everyday objects, rooms and machines are connected to one another and to the larger digital world. In this web of people and objects, individuals as well as things will have their own unique URL and, according to interactions between all these entities, social networks will be articulated with a ring of connected objects. This mash up of "hyper groups" and "hyper objects" will be the next step towards a deeper level of automation in which the user interface has vanished, the explicit control over the world is no longer the rule and where the users will have to understand the dynamic changes of their environment in relation to their social interactions and to their physical behaviour. The design of IoT based services therefore raises many challenges related to the user experience and requires a deep understanding of users' needs in their real life environment as well as many field experiments; this is why the Living Lab approach appears as the qualification device which has been lacking so far. As described in a paper accepted for ServDes2012 conference (Fevruary 2012) among 80 papers submitted, we developed and tested two methods designed for Internet of Things service idea generation: GenIOT (Generative Technique for the Internet of Things) and Aloha! (Animation Lens: Object/Human Actoring!) methods.

• The GenIOT method aims at providing citizen a tool for identifying and sharing examples of situations where they may benefit from an Internet of Things based service. Indeed the objective is to help the introspective effort of analysing one’ own daily behavior and unveil situated data in order to develop grounded internet of things services ideation. Fake sensors are placed by the participants in their daily environnement and pictures of the sensors in situ are shared and tagged on a collaborative platform. Other participants are invited to discuss on line the ideas behind the pictures. Gamification rules are implemented in the platform in order to enhance collaboration and participation.

• The Aloha! method tackles another creative dimension as it asks participants to role or play charcaters or objects and bodystorm a collaborative scenario meeting the characters need. Participants report it to be a fun and effective method, alternative to traditional brainstorming and integrating serendipity as a creative asset.

For the exploration step in the context of ELLIOT, we developed NiceAir, an android mock-up for visualizing air quality data on Google map in Nice as well as some interest points (free bikes, free park places, bus stop, etc.). Such a mock-up will be available in the co-creation step of green services in the ELLIOT project and during the european Mobility Week.

Mock-ups for two innovation processes (exploration step)

Participants : Lucile Gramusset, Guillaume Pilot, Mohamed Gaieb, Bernard Senach, Brigitte Trousse.

In the context of two contracts (TICTAC and ELLIOT) related to user oriented innovation process, we have developped two mock-ups

• Based on the user feedback from the first experiment in TIC TAC (CF. section 8.1.1 , we decided to develop a mock-up MobilTIC of a real-time information service related to public transportation (Envibus & SNCF) useable for any smartphone with internet access for Sophia-Antipolis workers. We designed a Web interface the most simple based on PHP/Mysql technologies and accessible from a computer or 3G mobile phone. Usage analysis of MobilTIC has been anticipated by providing rich logs. An exploration task with citizen is planned in January 2012 with a new experiment with an improved version.

• A first mock-up called Nice Air has been developped in the context of ELLIOT (Cf. section 8.3.1.1 by L. Gramusset and M. Gaieb on androïd smartphone for providing information related to air quality and noise on a map of the area of Nice Cote d'Azur with some interest points such as bus stops and Vélib parkings.