Home, Smart Home: Informing Mobile User Interfaces for Smart Environments

Abstract

The wave of the transformation of products and services into smart ones has triggered the rise of device interoperability and contributed to the growth of smart home technology turnover globally. In late years, companies within this industry are committing effort not only towards widening their product range - which may be reasonably considered as their core business - but pairing such smart devices with a mobile application, as well, enabling users to easily control their own smart environment. In this regard, both industry and research advocate the formalization of a framework to assist designers, researchers and practitioners from the HCI domain on informing state-of-the-art mobile user interfaces (or MUIs) within the home automation context.

Following a research through design approach, this master’s thesis contributes to address the need articulated above: findings emerging from this work culminated in a set of 21 design guidelines - covering 5 key areas in the home automation context: user control, user feedback and situational awareness, spatial awareness, security and privacy in multi-user environments, and customization and flexibility. To justify the outcome of this result, the report describes the design process being adopted, composed of three major iterations - in which user research, together with ideation, prototyping and evaluation activities were carried out, recurring to interaction design methodology - and operated in collaboration with The Company, with the goal of designing a new MUI, taking shape and concretized in the form of an interactive, high-fidelity prototype. Potential future work, based on the results achieved in this project - hence both involving the set of design guidelines and the high-fidelity prototype - and on the possibility of a novel design ideation method, emerged throughout the design process, is discussed in the conclusion.