In The Field Monitoring of Interactive Applications

TL;DR

This paper investigates how field monitoring of interactive applications affects user experience, revealing that users can tolerate certain overhead levels, which informs the design of more user-friendly monitoring solutions.

Contribution

It provides an initial analysis of the impact of real-world monitoring on user experience, highlighting the potential for designing less intrusive monitoring methods.

Findings

Non-trivial overhead can be tolerated by users

User perception depends on activity type

Opportunities for designing opportunistic monitoring

Abstract

Monitoring techniques can extract accurate data about the behavior of software systems. When used in the field, they can reveal how applications behave in real-world contexts and how programs are actually exercised by their users. Nevertheless, since monitoring might need significant storage and computational resources, it may interfere with users activities degrading the quality of the user experience. While the impact of monitoring has been typically studied by measuring the overhead that it may introduce in a monitored application, there is little knowledge about how monitoring solutions may actually impact on the user experience and to what extent users may recognize their presence. In this paper, we present our investigation on how collecting data in the field may impact the quality of the user experience. Our initial results show that non-trivial overhead can be tolerated by users, depending on the kind of activity that is performed. This opens interesting opportunities for research in monitoring solutions, which could be designed to opportunistically

Figures

Full text

See pages 1-last of NIER2017_arxvi.pdf