A Method to Design a Smart Home Interface

Abstract

Smart home grids require that their control devices are both usable and acceptable. The assessment of device usability and acceptability is often neglected due to the cost of prototyping solutions to be submitted to end-user during the different stages of the design process. In this context, the present paper describes a structured User-Centered Design (UCD) approach to develop usable control devices. It exploits advanced Tangible Augmented Reality (TAR) technique to represent the achieved design solution and perform usability testing without increasing development time and costs. Experimental results prove that such technology sensibility increases timesaving compared with traditional prototyping approaches and demonstrate its reliability to detect usability problems.