How to Evaluate the Social Effects and User Experience of Systems Enhancing Collocated Interactions?

Enhancing collocated interactions with interactive technology has quickly gained plenty of interest in the HCI community. Our approach within this research domain is to design and study mobile and wearable technology that encourages and motivates social interaction between collocated people. This paper sheds light on the considerations related to evaluating systems that address the complex and delicate issues related to social interaction. How do we evaluate the effectiveness of enhancing social interaction? How do we know if a system or a prototype is of high quality? What are the quality attributes? We highlight various evaluation challenges we have encountered in our studies and provide considerations for future research.