“Siri, did I leave the
oven on?”
Mundane UX design for the connected home
Claire Rowland
@clurr
Thursday, 27 September 2012

Whatʼs friends
the odd family
one shopping
out?
home work
travel
leisure interests
Thursday, 27 September 2012

Whatʼs
the odd
one
out?
home
Thursday, 27 September 2012
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.

Thursday, 27 September 2012

Opinions are entirely my own :)
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And the interfaces that I can show right now, I am not responsible for designing.

Whatʼs a connected
home?
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Embedded computing in everyday objects...
...connected up to the internet
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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...

In-home display
Web and mobile interfaces
Smart plug
Understand energy
use...
Energy clamp
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This is AlertMeʼs current energy service.

Control your
heating...
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This is AlertMeʼs current remote heating
controller.

Motion sensor
Camera
Contact sensor
Secure your home Key fobs
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AlertMe home
security.

Thereʼs more...
Holiday home, Connected light
recreational bulbs, electrical
vehicle, car and sockets and door
boat monitoring locks
Connected
Aging in place: appliances: ovens,
panic buttons, dishwashers,
activity monitoring tumble dryers
Pet care:
connected Safety devices:
catflaps, gun cabinets (US!)
automated feeders
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This home
automation stuff
has been around for
ages though, hasnʼt
it?
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Connected
home
technology has
existed since at
least as far
back as 1975...
This is X10 Powerhouse for the
Commodore 64, from 1986.
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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...
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...and/or a geek
• It was difficult to install
• Too many competing and
proprietary standards
meant poor interoperability
• Usability was poor
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For most people, the benefits just didnʼt outweigh the cost

Things are changing...
• Itʼs getting cheaper
• Wireless technologies make
installation easier
• More open standards
increase interoperability
• Design is (slowly) improving
to make it easier for non-
geeks
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People are more accustomed to “little bits
of smartness”...
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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”
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The challenges now are less in the
technology...
and more in understanding
and
delivering what the mass
market actually needs
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NB: big UX
opportunity

The industry is better at this bit...
“Connected” “home”
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Itʼs still quite
technology led.

“Connected” “home”
...than this bit
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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
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There are many, here are 5...

UX challenge 1:
Get the design
metaphor right
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AT&T
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Greenwave
Reality
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Home Automation Ltd
(yes, really)
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Spot the design
metaphor?
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Spot the design
metaphor?
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• System has users and • One phone/keyfob =
peripheral devices one user
• Users have access • Program home for
permissions, are in or out optimal efficiency!
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This is the (very old) AlertMe home monitoring homepage.

“Users could manage their deployment.”
The Microsoft Home OS team
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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
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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
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e.g. Little Jack isnʼt normally allowed to watch that much TV, but today heʼs ill so youʼre feeling sorry for him
e.g. The sheets ought to be washed but everyoneʼs busy so theyʼll do for a bit longer.

We already have a perfectly sudo open-window
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.
Thursday, 27 September 2012

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.
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The design metaphor also
influences aesthetics
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Is this what being at home feels like?

Comcast
Xfinity
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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.
Thursday, 27 September 2012

UX challenge 2:
A home is a complex
social context
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• 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
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“My teenagers skulk in their
bedrooms. Theyʼre not out, but
theyʼre not really in either...”
Thursday, 27 September 2012

• A connected home surfaces
information about what is 21 °C 19 °C
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
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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
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Tumble dryers are a particular source of angst.

Presence surfaces trust and
privacy issues
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?
Thursday, 27 September 2012

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)
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• 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
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Attention is a precious
commodity
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• 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
Thursday, 27 September 2012

My washing machine behaves as
if washing clothes was the most
urgent and important thing in
my life
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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?...
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..with a whole load of new and
unusual ways to break down?
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Spend too much time Facebooking your house
and your partner might leave you
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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
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User instructions:
1) Ignore it
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Wattbox - intelligent heating controller (prototype hardware shown).

UX challenge 4:
We canʼt rely on
existing mental
models
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Might call Primary aim is
the police deterrence
Sensors are just Makes a loud
part of the alarm noise
Existing mental models...
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...may not map well
Primary aim is
peace of mind
May not be visible/
audible outside
Multiple actions
Sensor data is possible: cameras,
highly visible messaging, lights...
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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.

Some mental
models are wrong
to start with
“When itʼs cold
you need to turn
the heating on.”
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NB: this might sound silly
but itʼs far more logical:
“My thermostat is
too confusing to
use so when I
want to turn the
heating up I put it
in the fridge.”
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...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.”
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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
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UX challenge 5:
Many layers of UX
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Physical hardware design, boxes
and help guides
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Device, web and mobile interfaces
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Cross-device interactions, aka
interusability
See http://bugi.oulu.fi/~ksegerst/publications/p219-waljas.pdf
Thursday, 27 September 2012
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.

Continuity:
Seamless
synchronisation of
data and content
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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!

discover
support purchase
The whole service
experience needs
considering
in-life use install
set up
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Another big challenge:
Doing complex UX
on startup time
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Minimum viable
user research
Review 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
Thursday, 27 September 2012

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
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User-centred design has good tools
for designing products
energy
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platform
? ? ? ?
energy heating security lighting appliances
?
...but isn’t yet geared towards designing platforms
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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!
Thursday, 27 September 2012
A complex and worthy challenge, and one many more of us will be getting involved in.

Thank you
@clurr
claire@clairerowland.com
Thanks to: Alex von Feldmann, Fraser Hamilton, Martin Storey, Naintara Land and Anna
Kuriakose who have contributed insights, thinking and research to this presentation
Thursday, 27 September 2012

Fuck Buttons by Matt Biddulph
House by lilivanili
Office by Phil Whitehouse
Shopping basket by Jonathan Harford
X10 Powerhouse from commodore.ca
Thanks for
the photos Internet fridge from fuckyeahinternetfridge.tumblr.com
Messy House by Elizabeth Table4Five
Trapped by Merina
Computer by Phil Gold
Crying child by eggonstilts
Army from hdwallpapers.com
Tea cosy by Brixton Makerhood
Teeth by ktpupp
Sleeping by Stan
Frustration by dieselbug2007
Washing machine firmware error by Adam Crickett
Houses by Peter O, Clive Darr, hollandhistory.net
Usabilty lab by Leanne Waldal
Burglar by homesecurityfocus.com
Mongkok advertising by Slices of Light
Posh house by Savant Toronto
Teenage bedroom by Wendizzle
HAL smarthome by james.lipsit.com
Jack Black from bradley.chattablogs.com
Holiday home: geograph.co.uk
Older woman: soylentgreen23
Thursday, 27 September 2012

S Intille, The goal: Smart people not smart homes (2006)
Thanks for the 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)
research
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 '08
Thursday, 27 September 2012