Designing Human-Centered Interactions for Smart Environments Based on Heterogeneous, Interrelated Systems: A User Research Method for the “Age of Services” (URSERVe)

Abstract

Heterogeneous, interrelated systems leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT) in smart environments such as a smart factory or smart city, pose many challenges for software design and development. Capturing and addressing the human needs is one of them and designing the interactions within smart applications is another. There are several reasons for this, for example diverse personas for both human as well as digital actors, a large variety of usage scenarios, a vast number of data exchange protocols, as well as data privacy and ethical concerns. On top of this, the service-based architecture of smart environments has widened the gap between software development teams and their end users. Services are highly modular, decoupled units of application logic, developed for specific task units and as such they are one or even several hierarchy layers removed from the business logic of main applications, and, in consequence, from the applications’ users. Therefore, in our experience, service development groups often refrain from identifying their users and doing any kind of user research at all. The reasoning being that, because their services will only be used by applications or other services, and not directly by human or non-human users, these users cannot be identified at all or are of no importance. This paper proposes a bidirectional, complementary method to approach user research for smart environments, such as smart cities. It describes how service development teams can reach beyond the applications which consume their service to the users of these consuming apps and how, at the same time, the smart city projects can reap the benefits of the technological expertise that resides in the service development groups. Ultimately, the method helps to create a shared knowledge base which arguably fosters innovation within an organization responsible for the design, development and operation of smart environments.