With the advent of DIY smart homes and the Internet of Things comes the emergence of user interfaces for domestic humanbuilding 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 a different abstraction, 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. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → User studies; Ubiquitous and mobile computing design and evaluation methods;

Network connectivity is often one of the most challenging aspects of deploying sensors. In many countries, cellular networks provide the most reliable, highest bandwidth, and greatest coverage option for internet access. Repurposing smartphones as gateways could extract value from hundreds of millions of devices currently considered to be e-waste. While these factors make smartphones a seemingly ideal platform to serve as a gateway between sensors and the cloud, we find that a device designed for multi-tenant operation and frequent human interaction becomes unreliable when tasked to continuously run a single application with no human interaction, a somewhat counter-intuitive result. Further, we find that economy phones cannot physically withstand continuous operation, resulting in a surprisingly high rate of permanent device failures in the field. If these observations hold more broadly, they would make mobile phones poorly suited to a range of sensing applications for which they have been rumored to hold great promise.

No abstract

Smart space technologies have entered the mainstream home market. Most users currently interact with smart homes that they (or an acquaintance) have set up and know well. However, as these technologies spread to commercial or public environments, users will need to frequently interact with unfamiliar smart spaces where they are unaware of the available capabilities and the system maintainer will not be present to help. Users will need to quickly and independently 1) discover what is and is not possible, and 2) make use of available functionality. Widespread adoption of smart space systems will not be possible until this discoverability issue is solved. We design and evaluate ARticulate, an interface that allows users to have successful smart space interactions with an intelligent assistant while learning transferable information about the overall set of devices in an unfamiliar space. Our method of using Snapchat-like contextual photo messages enhanced by two technologies---augmented reality and autocomplete---allows users to determine available functionality and achieve their goals in one attempt with a smart space they have never seen before, something no existing interface supports. The ability to easily operate unfamiliar smart spaces improves the usability of existing systems and removes a significant obstacle to the vision of ubiquitous computing.

No abstract