Devices and Data and Agents, Oh My: How Smart Home Abstractions Prime End-User Mental Models
Meghan Clark, Prabal Dutta, Mark W. Newman

Citation
Meghan Clark, Prabal Dutta, Mark W. Newman. "Devices and Data and Agents, Oh My: How Smart Home Abstractions Prime End-User Mental Models". Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), 1(3), September 2017.

Abstract
With the advent of DIY smart homes and the Internet of Things comes the emergence of user interfaces for domestic human-building interaction. However, the design trade-offs between the different representations of a smart home's capabilities are still not well understood. In this work, we examine how four different smart home abstractions affect end users' mental models of a hypothetical system. We develop four questionnaires, each of which describes the same hypothetical smart home using different abstractions, and then we collect responses depicting desired smart home applications from over 1,500 Mechanical Turk workers. We find that the choice of abstraction strongly primes end users' responses. In particular, the purely device-oriented abstraction results in the most limited scenarios, suggesting that if we want users to associate smart home technologies with valuable high-level applications we should shift the UI paradigm for the Internet of Things from device-oriented control to other abstractions that inspire a greater diversity of interactions.

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Citation formats

• HTML

  Meghan Clark, Prabal Dutta, Mark W. Newman. <a
  href="http://www.terraswarm.org/pubs/957.html"
  >Devices and Data and Agents, Oh My: How Smart Home
  Abstractions Prime End-User Mental Models</a>,
  <i>Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile,
  Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT)</i>,
  1(3), September 2017.

• Plain text

  Meghan Clark, Prabal Dutta, Mark W. Newman. "Devices
  and Data and Agents, Oh My: How Smart Home Abstractions
  Prime End-User Mental Models". <i>Proceedings of
  the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous
  Technologies (IMWUT)</i>, 1(3), September 2017.

• BibTeX

  @article{ClarkDuttaNewman17_DevicesDataAgentsOhMyHowSmartHomeAbstractionsPrime,
      author = {Meghan Clark and Prabal Dutta and Mark W. Newman},
      title = {Devices and Data and Agents, Oh My: How Smart Home
                Abstractions Prime End-User Mental Models},
      journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile,
                Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT)},
      volume = {1},
      number = {3},
      month = {September},
      year = {2017},
      abstract = {With the advent of DIY smart homes and the
                Internet of Things comes the emergence of user
                interfaces for domestic human-building
                interaction. However, the design trade-offs
                between the different representations of a smart
                home's capabilities are still not well understood.
                In this work, we examine how four different smart
                home abstractions affect end users' mental models
                of a hypothetical system. We develop four
                questionnaires, each of which describes the same
                hypothetical smart home using different
                abstractions, and then we collect responses
                depicting desired smart home applications from
                over 1,500 Mechanical Turk workers. We find that
                the choice of abstraction strongly primes end
                users' responses. In particular, the purely
                device-oriented abstraction results in the most
                limited scenarios, suggesting that if we want
                users to associate smart home technologies with
                valuable high-level applications we should shift
                the UI paradigm for the Internet of Things from
                device-oriented control to other abstractions that
                inspire a greater diversity of interactions.},
      URL = {http://terraswarm.org/pubs/957.html}
  }
  

Posted by Mary Stewart on 24 May 2017.
Groups: pw