(now an old version) The Web and Beyond: "Siri, did I leave the oven on?" Mundane UX for the...

“Siri, did I leave the oven on?”Mundane UX design for the connected home

Claire Rowland @clurr

Thursday, 27 September 2012

Whatʼs the odd one out?

friends

shopping

leisure interests

family

home

travel

work


Whatʼs the odd one out?

home


Your home is the one significant thing in your life that you canʼt stay in contact with online. Itʼs a big dumb box of mostly dumb things that canʼt talk to you, or each other.

Opinions are entirely my own :)


And the interfaces that I can show right now, I am not responsible for designing.

Whatʼs a connected home?


Embedded computing in everyday objects...

...connected up to the internet


Sensors and controllers around the home, embedded computing in everyday objects, and connecting it all up to the internet so you can access and control it via web and phone. Currently that allows you to do things like...

Understand energy use...

Energy clamp

In-home display

Smart plug

Web and mobile interfaces


This is AlertMeʼs current energy service.

Control your heating...


This is AlertMeʼs current remote heating controller.

Camera

Contact sensor

Key fobs

Motion sensor

Secure your homeThursday, 27 September 2012

AlertMe home security.

Thereʼs more...

Holiday home, recreational vehicle, car and boat monitoring

Connected light bulbs, electrical sockets and door locks

Aging in place: panic buttons, activity monitoring

Connected light bulbs, electrical sockets and door locks

Connected appliances: ovens, dishwashers, tumble dryers

Pet care: connected catflaps, automated feeders

Safety devices: gun cabinets (US!)


This home automation stuff has been around for ages though, hasnʼt it?


Connected home technology has existed since at least as far back as 1975...

This is X10 Powerhouse for the Commodore 64, from 1986.


It let you schedule lights and appliances to turn on and off, control a burglar alarm and thermostat, and could be operated remotely by telephone. Those are pretty much the things Iʼm working on right now. Except the telephoneʼs got a bit smaller and now we have the internet.

Well, yeah, actually.

...but you had to be rich...


• It was difficult to install

•Too many competing and proprietary standards meant poor interoperability

•Usability was poor

...and/or a geek


For most people, the benefits just didnʼt outweigh the cost

• Itʼs getting cheaper

•Wireless technologies make installation easier

•More open standards increase interoperability

•Design is (slowly) improving to make it easier for non-geeks

Things are changing...


People are more accustomed to “little bits of smartness”...


embedded computing and even intelligence. my rice cooker is an AI: it uses fuzzy logic to figure out how long to cook for.

...and we have a metaphor for the “remote control for your life”


The challenges now are less in the technology...

and more in understanding and delivering what the mass market actually needs


NB: big UX opportunity

“Connected” “home”

The industry is better at this bit...


Itʼs still quite technology led.

“Connected” “home”

...than this bitThursday, 27 September 2012

No good at designing it in ways that work in home environment. This is where UX comes in.

With my colleagues, I have been working on understanding what this technology could do for people, where it often goes wrong for people, and defining what I think a good connected home UX might look like.

These come from reviewing competitors, academic research, and our own concept testing...

5 key UX challenges


There are many, here are 5...

UX challenge 1:

Get the design metaphor right


AT&TThursday, 27 September 2012

Greenwave Reality


Home Automation Ltd(yes, really)


Spot the design metaphor?


•System has users and peripheral devices

•Users have access permissions, are in or out

•One phone/keyfob = one user

•Program home for optimal efficiency!


This is the (very old) AlertMe home monitoring homepage.

“Users could manage their deployment.”The Microsoft Home OS team


The Microsoft HomeOS team take the view that this is right.

People understand computers, with users, access permissions and suchlike, and that that makes this a suitable metaphor for a smarthome.

This causes them to say things like “Users could manage their deployment.” Iʼm sure theyʼre very smart but this is boring corporate IT speak and most of us donʼt want to take that home with us.

ʻRomantikʼ mode: an engineering solution to a human non-problem


Modes are a common smart home feature. But they require a lot of planning and advance configuration. Which isnʼt very sexy.

Real life is too messy to program•People are generally a bit disorganised and bad at predicting their future needs

•Life is full of contradictions and exceptions

•Devices are shared, and lent

•Whoʼs allowed to do what is negotiated and flexible, not completely codified


e.g. Little Jack isnʼt normally allowed to watch that much TV, but today heʼs ill so youʼre feeling sorry for hime.g. The sheets ought to be washed but everyoneʼs busy so theyʼll do for a bit longer.

We already have a perfectly good metaphor for the home:

Itʼs the home This one happens to be my home. I donʼt want to log into it, become a super user, or worry that itʼs going to crash or need debugging.

sudo open-window


Most of all, itʼs my refuge: the last place in the world I want to feel out of control.

And weʼve all seen how people often feel out of control of computers when they are too hard to use or do things we donʼt understand.


The design metaphor also influences aesthetics


Is this what being at home feels like?

Comcast Xfinity


Comcast XFinity alarm system screenshots. Features words like DISARM and ALL QUIET and a big red circle that looks a bit like HAL.

Just because my home is connected doesnʼt mean it should stop feeling like home: a safe and comfortable place.

It just got a bit smarter, thatʼs all.


UX challenge 2:

A home is a complex social context


•There is often more than one person in a house

•They have interpersonal dynamics

•They may want different things

•Some of them are visitors or impromptu guests


“My teenagers skulk in their bedrooms. Theyʼre not out, but theyʼre not really in either...”


•A connected home surfaces information about what is happening within it

• Itʼs often possible to work out who is in, out, turning the heating up all the time, or on the Playstation

•When parties have different ideas about how things should be, that surfaces tensions

21 °C 19 °C


Itʼs a healthy and necessary part of most relationships to have the right to some private space, and to ignore or pretend not to notice some of the other personʼs behaviours. Technology makes this harder.

Tension between the person who uses the energy monitor and the people who use the appliances is common


Tumble dryers are a particular source of angst.

Who came in at what time? (Did they look drunk? Was anyone with them?!!)

How long did the cleaner really stay?

If this information is up on the internet, who might get access to it?

Presence surfaces trust and privacy issues


UX challenge 3:

“People donʼt want more control of their homes. They want more control of their lives”Scott Davidoff, Min Kyung Lee, Charles Yiu, John Zimmerman, Anind K. Dey: Principles of Smart Home Control (Ubicomp 2006)


•The computer centric model focuses on surfacing lots of information and controls and programming sequences of actions

• It requires a lot of conscious effort and attention


Attention is a precious commodity


•A lot of what goes on in the home is actually pretty unremarkable and mundane

•We develop routines to help us stay on top of the boring stuff without too much conscious effort

•This allows us to save our attention for important or interesting things


My washing machine behaves as if washing clothes was the most urgent and important thing in my life


It beeps when itʼs finished a load. That is fine. But it doesnʼt stop beeping until you empty it. It expects you to drop everything and come running, right now, because the washing must come out IMMEDIATELY. This is appropriate behaviour from a burglar alarm, but not a washing machine.

What if you had a whole home full of needy, attention seeking devices?...


..with a whole load of new and unusual ways to break down?


Spend too much time Facebooking your house and your partner might leave you


Ericsson made a video about the social web of things, in which a manʼs home and his appliances all talk to each other (and him) via some weird kind of Facebook analog. It is meant to look easy but he seems to spend a lot of his time in idle chat with his house. Right at the end, his girlfriend dumps him and he spends the rest of his evening alone with the house. Apparently this is a promotional video.

Do the boring stuff Iʼm rubbish at so that I can spend time thinking about more interesting things


User instructions:

1) Ignore it


Wattbox - intelligent heating controller (prototype hardware shown).

UX challenge 4:

We canʼt rely on existing mental models


Primary aim is deterrence

Makes a loud noise

Sensors are just part of the alarm

Might call the police

Existing mental models...Thursday, 27 September 2012

May not be visible/audible outside

Multiple actions possible: cameras, messaging, lights...

Sensor data is highly visible

Primary aim is peace of mind

...may not map well


Monitoring has some of the properties of a burglar alarm, but not all. But it does a lot of extra stuff too. Thinking of it as a burglar alarm doesnʼt help you understand it.

“When itʼs cold you need to turn the heating on.”

Some mental models are wrong to start with


“My thermostat is too confusing to use so when I want to turn the heating up I put it in the fridge.”

NB: this might sound silly but itʼs far more logical:


...and sometimes people just have illogical habits or beliefs that challenge our assumptions about what to design

“I donʼt set my burglar alarm when Iʼm only going out for a few hours.”


Sometimes we have to make new mental models, or fix broken ones

At a glance, show: what it does, when, which devices are involved, and who will be affected

Be forgiving: mitigate the impact of ʻincorrectʼ usage


UX challenge 5:

Many layers of UX


Physical hardware design, boxes and help guides


Device, web and mobile interfaces


Cross-device interactions, akainterusability

See http://bugi.oulu.fi/~ksegerst/publications/p219-waljas.pdf


Interusability: usability for services composed of interconnected devices. Important to create the experience of interacting with the service, not just a device. See Minna Wäljas et al paper in the references.

A number of aspects of interusability, like assigning the right interactions to the right devices and figuring out what degree of consistency is appropriate across the different devices and platforms.

http://bugi.oulu.fi/~ksegerst/publications/p219-waljas.pdf

http://bugi.oulu.fi/~ksegerst/publications/p219-waljas.pdf

Continuity:Seamless synchronisation of data and content


Perhaps the biggest challenge is continuity.

If i interact with the service on one device, all other devices reflect that change in state. e.g. if I turn the target heating temperature up on my physical thermostat, the new temperature should be immediately reflected on the smartphone too otherwise thereʼll be a confusing period when I have two devices saying different things. Not that easy to implement!

The whole service experience needs considering

purchase

discover

install

set up

in-life use

support


Another big challenge:

Doing complex UX on startup time


Minimum viable user researchReview academic research: there’s lots of it

I dream of time for ethno but right now, the focus is too broad, context too complex to manage it in the time I have

Make wireframes and test in a lab... playing fast and loose with ecological validity

No early adopters... they’re too unrepresentative


Mobile centric... but not quite mobile first

The web is useful for testing conceptual models of new things: you can put lots of things in front of people at once and see how they interpret them

Once a product's conceptual model is well defined, we focus most heavily on mobile, as the central control platform

We zoom back out to web later


User-centred design has good tools for designing products

energy


platform

...but isn’t yet geared towards designing platforms

energy heating security lighting

?? ? ?

appliances

?


What the connected home needs is a platform: a framework for making all this stuff work together, and lots of new, unanticipated stuff too. User-centred design tools can be a bit too linear for this.

For example, it’s impossible to define personas with any degree of specificity for general smart home, it's like defining personas for people who live in homes. You need different ones for different product lines, e.g. to reflect different motivations around energy (who's to say that the DIY fiend in home security is also the energy saver in heating?

You have to look at fundamental logical structure of tasks and concepts and look for common components, like timers, danger warnings. You then apply UCD to explore each example. I don’t claim we’ve got this right yet and would love to find the right methods.

Ultimately itʼs a very broad challenge:

Letʼs make all kinds of things for people who live in homes!


A complex and worthy challenge, and one many more of us will be getting involved in.

Thank you

@[email protected]

Thanks to: Alex von Feldmann, Fraser Hamilton, Martin Storey, Naintara Land and Anna Kuriakose who have contributed insights, thinking and research to this presentation


mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Fuck Buttons by Matt BiddulphHouse by lilivaniliOffice by Phil WhitehouseShopping basket by Jonathan HarfordX10 Powerhouse from commodore.caInternet fridge from fuckyeahinternetfridge.tumblr.comMessy House by Elizabeth Table4FiveTrapped by MerinaComputer by Phil GoldCrying child by eggonstiltsArmy from hdwallpapers.comTea cosy by Brixton MakerhoodTeeth by ktpuppSleeping by StanFrustration by dieselbug2007Washing machine firmware error by Adam CrickettHouses by Peter O, Clive Darr, hollandhistory.net Usabilty lab by Leanne WaldalBurglar by homesecurityfocus.comMongkok advertising by Slices of LightPosh house by Savant TorontoTeenage bedroom by WendizzleHAL smarthome by james.lipsit.comJack Black from bradley.chattablogs.comHoliday home: geograph.co.ukOlder woman: soylentgreen23

Than

ks fo

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e ph

otos


S Intille, The goal: Smart people not smart homes (2006)http://web.media.mit.edu/~intille/papers-files/IntilleICOST06.pdf

Minna Wäljas, Katarina Segerståhl, Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila, Harri Oinas-Kukkonen: Cross-Platform Service User Experience: A Field Study and an Initial Framework (Nordichi 2010)http://bugi.oulu.fi/~ksegerst/publications/p219-waljas.pdf

Colin Dixon, Ratul Mahajan, Sharad Agarwal, AJ Brush, Bongshin Lee, Stefan Saroiu, and Victor Bahl, An Operating System for the Home (NSDI, USENIX, April 2012)

Pertti Huuskonen: Run to the Hills! Ubiquitous Computing Meltdown (Advances in Ambient Intelligence, 2007)

Peter Tolmie, James Pycock, Tim Diggins. Allan Maclean, Alain Karsenty, Unremarkable Computing (Ubiquity, 2002).

Genevieve Bell & Paul Dourish: Yesterdayʼs tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computingʼs dominant vision (Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 2006)http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jpd/ubicomp/BellDourish-YesterdaysTomorrows.pdf

Scott Davidoff, Min Kyung Lee, Charles Yiu, John Zimmerman, and Anind K. Dey: Principles of Smart Home Control (Ubicomp 2006)

T Saizmaa, A Holistic Understanding of HCI Perspectives on Smart Home, Networked Computing and Advanced Information Management, 2008. NCM '08Th

anks

for t

he

rese

arch


http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=157701

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=157701

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jpd/ubicomp/BellDourish-YesterdaysTomorrows.pdf

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jpd/ubicomp/BellDourish-YesterdaysTomorrows.pdf

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?punumber=4623957

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?punumber=4623957

(now an old version) The Web and Beyond: "Siri, did I leave the oven on?" Mundane UX for the...

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