“Siri, did I leave the oven on?” Mundane UX principles for the connected home Claire Rowland UK UPA 17.05.12 Friday, 25 May 2012

Whatʼs the odd one out? friends shopping leisure interests family home travel work Friday, 25 May 2012

Whatʼs the odd one out? home Friday, 25 May 2012 Your home is the one significant thing in your life that you canʼt stay in contact with online.

Iʼm the service design manager for AlertMe. Weʼre a connected home platform provider. Friday, 25 May 2012 Although there are about a hundred of us, we are still a startup, with a few thousand mostly early adopter users of the direct to consumer services we been releasing since 2007. These days we are mostly B2B focused, soon to be launching large scale commercial services through partners such as energy companies, DIY retailers and more.

I can show you some examples of what we do, but Iʼve not been there long and canʼt yet show you our current design redevelopment work. So bear in mind that any AlertMe designs in this presentation will be old, and due for improvement. CAUTION: OUTDATED DESIGN Friday, 25 May 2012

internet connected heating controllers... Currently, we do things like: Friday, 25 May 2012

...energy monitoring... Friday, 25 May 2012

...home security monitoring... Friday, 25 May 2012 Internet enabled intruder alarms, cameras, and limited home automation.

How does it work? Friday, 25 May 2012

AlertMe uses Zigbee/Z-Wave to maintain very low power connections between sensors/devices and the hub. The hub connects to the cloud service via broadband or GPRS and the user interacts with the service via a secure website and mobile apps. Heating controls Energy monitor In-home display Smart plug Camera Contact sensor Key fobs Motion sensor Hub Friday, 25 May 2012

These are just current sensors/controllers. Other things we plan to support soon, some through 3rd party devices: • Home safety: e.g. flood monitors, smoke alarms, medicine and gun cabinets (US!) • Holiday home, RV, car and boat monitoring • Elderly care: panic buttons, activity monitoring • Pet care: cat flaps, automatic feeders • Automation: light switches, electrical sockets, window blinds • Connected appliances: ovens, dishwashers, tumble dryers NB: no internet fridges, thankfully Friday, 25 May 2012

But this stuff has been around for ages and it never took off, right? Friday, 25 May 2012

But it has not been widely adopted by the mass market • It was difficult to install • The cost of ownership was high • Too many competing and proprietary standards meant poor interoperability • Usability was poor: it was strictly geek territory • Users were unconvinced of the value of a central home brain X10 Powerhouse for the C64: 1986 Let you schedule lights and appliances to turn on and off, control a burglar alarm and thermostat, and could be operated remotely by telephone. Sound familiar? Connected home technology has existed since at least as far back as 1975 Friday, 25 May 2012

• Itʼs getting cheaper • Wireless technologies make installation easier • More open standards increase interoperability • Design is (slowly) improving to make it easier for non-geeks • Greater acceptance of “little bits of smartness”: connectivity and embedded computing in everyday objects • We have a metaphor for a “remote control for your life”: the smartphone But things are changing Friday, 25 May 2012 There are other companies doing or researching some or all of these things too: you may have heard of iControl, Nest, Opower, Microsoft HomeOS...

This is no longer the proximate future. The challenges now are less in the technology and more in understanding what the mass market actually needs. Friday, 25 May 2012 This is not ʻthe proximate futureʼ referred to by Bell and Dourish: the discourse around ubiquitous computing was always ʻin the future we will have xʼ, yet the future kept arriving and we still didnʼt. These are commercial services. They are not quite mass market yet, but they are heading that way. I promise you that the challenge is less in the technology than it is in understanding what the mass market needs and designing it appropriately for them.

What can it do for me? Friday, 25 May 2012

1: Personal informatics Friday, 25 May 2012 Insight I didnʼt have before. This is AlertMeʼs current energy service.

2: Remote control Friday, 25 May 2012 e.g. heating, door locks. This is AlertMeʼs current remote heating controller web interface.

3: Automation Friday, 25 May 2012 If this then that in response to an event: e.g. if the alarm goes off turn on a light and record video. This example is from AlertMeʼs home monitoring service. Automation can also be user controlled: e.g. when I come home, turn certain lights on and ensure the heating is set to a comfortable temperature.

“User instructions: 1) Ignore it. 2) Press up and down buttons to modify temperature. Wattbox learns your behaviour preferences.” 4: intelligence Friday, 25 May 2012 Intelligence: system learns and tries to figure out how to work appropriately. e.g. AlertMeʼs Wattbox intelligent heating controller, which learns when you are in, out and asleep by monitoring electrical activity in the house and uses clever psychological tricks to overcome the irrational, energy wasting behaviours humans tend to engage in when put in charge of a thermostat. We believe to be cleverer than Nest, if perhaps not as pretty. Itʼs a lot cheaper though. (NB this is an old design for Wattbox)

Towards a few design principles Friday, 25 May 2012 Iʼm not yet at the stage of being able to show you designs, or tell you how weʼve cracked the perfect process for UX in this area. Rest assured, weʼre pretty busy. I look forward to showing more soon. But 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. Here are a few of those principles.

1. Usability is not enough Friday, 25 May 2012

Of course, we need to address product design and device level UX and usability Friday, 25 May 2012

But we also need to think about interusability: Composition: Assigning actions appropriately across devices Consistency: What should, and should not, be the same on each device Continuity: Seamless synchronisation of data and content See http://bugi.oulu.fi/~ksegerst/publications/p219-waljas.pdf Friday, 25 May 2012 Interusability: usability for services composed of interconnected devices. Important to create the experience of interacting with the service: the device is just an avatar of that service. See Minna Wäljas et al paper in the references. Composition: Using the right devices for the right actions, distributing tasks appropriately between devices so that the mental model is clear. Consistency: Consistency isnʼt an absolute, it must be appropriate. Where you have a wide variety of devices there are multiple levels of consistency which come into conflict, the primary type is usually to the platform, but task mental model, and terminology must be same: It must be possible to tell which things are the same across devices. E.g. diagrams up to date in instructions. 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!

...and service design Embedded devices Service UIs Cloud Sales Support Servicing Friday, 25 May 2012

Many of us canʼt fix our own plumbing or electrics. Why should we be able to fix a complex computer system? Friday, 25 May 2012

2. A home is not a computer Friday, 25 May 2012

Life is messy People are generally a bit disorganised, especially at home. Life is full of contradictions and shades of grey. Itʼs all a bit fuzzy but hey, we get by. Friday, 25 May 2012 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.

Computers donʼt do messy Friday, 25 May 2012 A computer takes a very logical and black and white view of how things ought to be.

So why do we keep using the computer as a metaphor? Friday, 25 May 2012

• Homes have users, peripheral devices, and apps • Users have access permissions • One phone/keyfob = one user • Users are at home, or not at home • Itʼs oh-so-simple and binary Friday, 25 May 2012 This is the (very old) AlertMe home monitoring homepage.

“Users could manage their deployment.” The Microsoft Home OS team Friday, 25 May 2012 The Microsoft HomeOS team take the view that 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.”

what a depressing thing to say about a home Iʼm sure they are very smart but Friday, 25 May 2012

•Different members of the household will have different ideas and lifestyles •Teenagers skulk in bedrooms: they may be ʻinʼ but are not to be considered ʻpresentʼ •Devices are shared, and lent •Whoʼs allowed to do what is negotiated and flexible, not completely codified People are not binary Friday, 25 May 2012

We already have a perfectly 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 bug me with irritating little popups. sudo open-window Friday, 25 May 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. Friday, 25 May 2012

The smart home that takes over is a popular fiction trope Friday, 25 May 2012

“The Goal: Smart People, Not Smart Homes” “We want sensor-driven pervasive technologies to empower people with information that helps them make decisions, but we do not want to strip people of their sense of control over their environment.” The MIT House_n group Friday, 25 May 2012 A more humanistic approach?

People donʼt want more control of their homes They want more control of their lives Friday, 25 May 2012 See Davidoff et al reference at end.

Little bits of smartness, like boilers that can tell you they need repairing before they break down, are a lot less threatening than a huge ever-growing pulsating brain that rules from the centre of your living room. Those little bits can still connect to each other, but you donʼt have to buy into the whole system in one go. Friday, 25 May 2012 “Little bits of smartness” - Matt Jones.

3. Home technology should feel like home Friday, 25 May 2012

What kind of aesthetic do you want for your home? Friday, 25 May 2012

How about this one? Friday, 25 May 2012

Comcast want you to make sure youʼve secured the perimeter before you go to bed. Donʼt you know thereʼs a WAR out there? Friday, 25 May 2012 Comcast XFinity alarm system screenshots. Itʼs all a bit Andy McNab. This might be forgivable from a company specialising in alarm tech, but these are also the people who bring you films and telly so youʼd think theyʼd consider the wider home context.

Just because my home is becoming connected does not mean it should stop feeling homely, whatever that means to me. Experience design should reflect the feeling of home as a safe and comfortable place. Friday, 25 May 2012 See T Saizmaa article in references.

4. Homes are for people Friday, 25 May 2012

•There is often more than one of them in a house •They may want different things •They are not just users, they have interpersonal dynamics •Some of them are visitors or impromptu guests Friday, 25 May 2012

•A connected home surfaces information about what is happening within it •Itʼs often possible to work out who is doing what •When parties have different ideas about how things should be, that surfaces tensions 21 °C 19 °C Friday, 25 May 2012

“I donʼt want to know when my wife is having a shower” A recent research participant Tension between the person who uses the energy monitor and the people who use the appliances is common Friday, 25 May 2012

If you thought fighting over the TV remote control was bad enough, try fighting over the house We need to design tools that meet the needs of the whole household We need to support casual users Maybe we need to design tools that allow some people to opt out sometimes Friday, 25 May 2012

5. The mundane is (mostly) unremarkable Friday, 25 May 2012

•Peopleʼs lives are busy •Attention is precious •They deal with this by having routines that cover the boring stuff •This eases co-ordination and saves attention •They manage by exception Friday, 25 May 2012

My washing machine does lots of clever things to get clothes clean with a minimum of water and electricity. Unfortunately it was designed on the premise that this must be the most interesting and important thing in my life Friday, 25 May 2012 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. How about a little contextual awareness? Like only beeping when Iʼm actually in the kitchen?

Scale that up to a whole homeʼs worth of needy, attention seeking devices... Friday, 25 May 2012

Not to mention what happens when it all goes wrong... Friday, 25 May 2012 ...and you have a very nasty picture indeed. See Pertti Huuskonen reference at end.

Whatʼs so wrong about the internet fridge? It is designed to need more, not less attention Friday, 25 May 2012 It canʼt accept that no-one else is interested in fridge stuff... they only care about what is in the fridge.

Connected homes promise peace of mind Services need to learn how and when to ask for attention politely to preserve that peace of mind If my burglar alarm is going off, thatʼs important: make sure I get the message When things are unremarkable, shut up and get on with it Friday, 25 May 2012

Best of all JUST DO THE BORING STUFF SO I DONʼT HAVE TO Friday, 25 May 2012

User instructions: 1) Ignore it Friday, 25 May 2012 I keep referring to it, but this is why Wattbox is so powerful.

Thank you @clurr claire@clairerowland.com Thanks to: Alex von Feldmann, Fraser Hamilton, Martin Storey and Anna Kuriakose who have contributed insights, thinking and research to this presentation Friday, 25 May 2012

References S Intille, The goal: Smart people not smart homes (2006) 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) 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 Friday, 25 May 2012

Photo credits Fuck Buttons by Matt Biddulph House by lilivanili Office by Phil Whitehouse Shopping basket by Jonathan Harford X10 Powerhouse from atarimagazine.com Internet fridge from fuckyeahinternetfridge.tumblr.com Messy House by Elizabeth Table4Five Trapped by Merina Computer by Phil Gold Crying child by eggonstilts Simpsons Ultrahome3000 from Simpsons Wiki Toilet roll doll from acceptandchange.com 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 Servant bells by davidgsteadman Friday, 25 May 2012