HCI challenges for an Internet of services

Angela Kounkou, HCID - 21st April 2010

Outline

• Services

• The Internet of Services

• HCI-related challenges

• Questions and discussion

Service definition - 1

• “Products of economic activity that you can’t drop on your foot” (The Economist)

• Intangible. Processes. Not “owned”. Created, performed, contributed to.

• Have “touchpoints” – points of contact between the consumer and elements making up the service - that occur during the “user journey” - the consumers’ experiences with the service over time.

Example

TFL:

• Service

• Touchpoints

Service definition – 2: software services

• “Application that other applications and humans can discover and invoke” (Zakaria et al)

• Piece of software. Autonomous. Platform independent. Location independent. Modular.

• Can be published, discovered, executed, and/or composed with other pieces of software to form applications. In the case of Web services, these operations happen over the Internet.

Web service: high level architecture diagram

• The service is published, discovered, and consumed – “as-is” or in a composition with other pieces of software.

Software service example

Service–based application example – the consumer is a developer

Internet of Services - definition

• “An infrastructure that uses the Internet as a medium for offering and selling services” (Cardoso et al)

• Global network making electronic services available for use, reuse, composition etc. and connecting providers, consumers and facilitators throughout the world.

• Largely enabled by service-oriented computing• use web services as building blocks for the development of

distributed applications • Use web service standards to support the connection and exchange

of data between various apps

An illustration of what it could be like: Siri mobile concierge

http://siri.com/about/

Triggers for the IoS

• Growth of the service sector of the economy

• Technological advances, ubiquitous computing

• Growing consumer demand

HCI related challenges for the IoS

Services

• What approaches and techniques to design seamless, coherent offline and online services?

• How to dynamically monitor and influence the consumer experience?

• How to measure the consumer experience?

HCI related challenges for the IoS - 2

Software services

• How to support the human stakeholders in service-oriented computing?

• How to design for an unknown, unpredictable user?

• How to observe or measure the user experience?

Questions, comments, discussion…

Then lab! Or drinks in the kitchen…

Related links and/or reading

Mike Kuniavsky: Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design (expected December 2010)

Zakaria, M., B. Djamal, and Nanjangud, C. N.: What can context do for web services? In Communications of the ACM, ACM Press (2006), 98-103.

Cardoso, J., Voigt, K. and Winkler, M.: Service Engineering for The Internet of Services In Enterprise Information Systems, Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (2009) 15-27