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CMU-HCII-15-101
Human-Computer Interaction Institute
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
CMU-HCII-15-101
Virtual Machines for Remote Computing:
Measuring the User Experience
Brandon Taylor, Yoshihisa Abe, Anind Dey,
Mahadev Satyanarayanan, Dan Siewiorek, Asim Smailagic
July 2015
CMU-HCII-15-101.pdf
Also appears as Computer Science Technical Report
CMU-CS-15-118
Keywords:
User experience, virtual machines, demand paging, caching, prefetching
Virtual Machine (VM) encapsulation provides a way to provision existing software over the Internet
without any code modifications. However, distributing software introduces performance costs
that vary in complex ways. Our study provides empirical evidence of how network conditions,
software interfaces and VM provisioning techniques impact user experience. Using these results,
designers seeking to provision existing applications can better understand the usability impacts of
their design choices. Additionally, our study highlights the limitations of existing system response
time guidelines derived from HCI research conducted using text-based terminal applications. In
particular, we were able to identify how various, common aspects of GUI application interactions
are impacted by system delays and relate these effects to decreases in user satisfaction.
22 pages
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