In this paper, we present the iterative evaluation of a smart public display prototype for public transport. In our research project, we developed a working prototype of a smart and mobile public display. We iteratively evaluated several facets of our prototypes, following a user centered design approach. In this paper, we describe challenges and experiences during the development and evaluation of this smart and mobile public display, as well as the results of our studies so far and we discuss our evaluation steps as best practice examples.

Psychological effects can influence the active as well as the passive usage behavior of users of (semi-)public displays, and thus can lead to inaccurate results in evaluations. In this paper, we aim to gather the current knowledge about known and relevant effects in the deployment and operation of (semi-)public screens, so that they can be taken into account when designing or evaluating (semi-)public display applications. Additionally, we collect possible approaches to deal with these effects. The objective of this paper is to support the HCI community in understanding and planning the impact of the enumerated effects in future work.

In the CommunityMirror project we are researching networked information radiators that are based on large interactive screens showing information from different sources. Most research questions in the project are constructive – e.g. to find design parameters, to find solutions for implementing features and processes. For evaluating our solutions, we always face different problems acquiring the information about usage and non-usage in long term deployments. While working on the issues we found an interesting parallel: Most of the information needed for scientific evaluation is also needed for management issues. In this paper we briefly present the problem scenario – and the current concept for addressing this issue in the CommunityMirror implementation – in the form of a concept for a logging framework.

We present a longitudinal case study of implementing inter-active information radiators in practice. The insights from the case study include the importance of including users in finding relevant information, and of presenting this information in an attractive way. The semi-public space poses special challenges for design and clearly shows the need for doing research through (longitudinal) deployment-based studies. On the other side, the study also shows some problems of doing longitudinal case studies of semi-public installations – particularly field access and availability of quantitative data.