Control in Context: How Smart Home Users Navigate Proxy-based Schemes

A homeowner controls their smart home devices along a spectrum of approaches, ranging from physical device control to various proxy-based control modalities. This paper studies how and why users move along this spectrum in their day-to-day lives, building upon existing research that focused only on specific interactions. We surveyed smart home owners (𝑁 = 43 users), and conducted follow-up interviews with a subset of the survey participants (𝑁 = 8). Our studies allow us to both distill specific contexts and experiences of smart home owners as they navigate the control spectrum, as well as to describe how their experiences (both positive and negative) shape their tendencies to control devices in a particular way. These insights lead us to propose practical implications for designers and researchers of smart home management systems, including the need to support flexible control scheme transitions, reduce switching costs, and account for temporal and spatial heterogeneity in the evaluation and design of control systems.

• Human-centered computing → User studies; Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing; Collaborative and social computing design and evaluation methods; User studies; Interaction design.