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Exploring End User Programming Needs in Home Automation

Authors:

Michael Rietzler,

Florian SchaubAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), Volume 24, Issue 2

Article No.: 11, Pages 1 - 35

https://doi.org/10.1145/3057858

Published: 27 April 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Home automation faces the challenge of providing ubiquitous, unobtrusive services while empowering users with approachable configuration interfaces. These interfaces need to provide sufficient expressiveness to support complex automation, and notations need to be devised that enable less tech-savvy users to express such scenarios. Rule-based and process-oriented paradigms have emerged as opposing ends of the spectrum; however, their underlying concepts have not been studied comparatively. We report on a contextual inquiry study in which we collected qualitative data from 18 participants in 12 households on the current potential and acceptance of home automation, as well as explored the respective benefits and drawbacks of these two notation paradigms for end users. Results show that rule-based notations are sufficient for simple automation tasks but not flexible enough for more complex use cases. The resulting insights can inform the design of interfaces for smart homes to enable usable real-world home automation for end users.

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Cited By

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Xue XLi XJia BDu JFu X(2024)Who Should Hold Control? Rethinking Empowerment in Home Automation among Cohabitants through the Lens of Co-DesignProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642866(1-19)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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Index Terms

Exploring End User Programming Needs in Home Automation
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Interaction design
    1. Empirical studies in interaction design
  2. Ubiquitous and mobile computing
    1. Ubiquitous and mobile computing systems and tools
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools

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Information

Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction Volume 24, Issue 2

Special Issue EUD for IoT

April 2017

284 pages

ISSN:1073-0516

EISSN:1557-7325

DOI:10.1145/3077620

Editor:
Ken Hinckley
Microsoft Research

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Copyright © 2017 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 April 2017

Accepted: 01 January 2017

Revised: 01 January 2017

Received: 01 April 2016

Published in TOCHI Volume 24, Issue 2

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Cited By

Ikeda BSzafir D(2024)PRogramAR: Augmented Reality End-User Robot ProgrammingACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction10.1145/364000813:1(1-20)Online publication date: 12-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3640008
Xue XLi XJia BDu JFu X(2024)Who Should Hold Control? Rethinking Empowerment in Home Automation among Cohabitants through the Lens of Co-DesignProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642866(1-19)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642866
Manesh DWang MHu RLee S(2024)Beyond TAP: Piggybacking on IFTTT to Connect Triggers and Actions with JavaScript2024 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL/HCC60511.2024.00036(260-274)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/VL/HCC60511.2024.00036
Huang BChaki DBouguettaya ALam K(2023)A Survey on Conflict Detection in IoT-based Smart HomesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/362951756:5(1-40)Online publication date: 27-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3629517
Paternò F(2023)Humanations: A new understanding of human/automation interactionProceedings of the 2nd International Conference of the ACM Greek SIGCHI Chapter10.1145/3609987.3609988(1-4)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3609987.3609988
Mattioli APaternò F(2023)A Mobile Augmented Reality App for Creating, Controlling, Recommending Automations in Smart HomesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36042427:MHCI(1-22)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3604242
Liu XShi YYu CGao CYang TLiang CShi Y(2023)Understanding In-Situ Programming for Smart Home AutomationProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/35962547:2(1-31)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3596254
Woźniak MVöge SKrüger RMüller HKoelle MBoll S(2023)Inhabiting Interconnected Spaces: How Users Shape and Appropriate Their Smart Home EcosystemsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581497(1-18)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581497
Ziegler PChasins S(2023)A Need-Finding Study with Users of Geospatial DataProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581370(1-16)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
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Williams KHammer JHudson S(2023)The IoT Codex: A Book of Programmable Stickers for Authoring and Composing Embedded Computing Applications2023 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL-HCC57772.2023.00009(1-11)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2023
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