Designing for

user experiencein smart environmentsidentifying users' needs in early concept creation phase

Master’s thesis

Minni KanervaIndustrial and Strategic DesignDepartment of DesignAalto UniversitySchool of Design

ABSTRACT Author Minni Kanerva

Year of publication 2011

Department Department of Design

Degree programme Industrial and Strategic Design

Title Designing for user experience in smart environments - identifying users' needs in early concept creation phase

Type of work Master’s thesis

Language English

Number of pages 74 + 6 appendix pages

Abstract Information and communication technologies are increasingly embedded in our environment and in the future we might be living in smart environments which understand our behaviours and with which we are in direct interaction instead of interacting with traditional information appliances. This will change the relationship between human and technology substantially and it has effects on both our experience of environment and the design of it. The theories of user experience are nowadays concentrating on the user experience of single products and understand environment only in terms of a context which affects the experience. When interaction is moving from products increasingly towards entire smart environments the environment must be taken to the focus of user experience research.

The goal of this thesis was to define the characteristics of user experience in smart environments and its implications to design. Moreover, the goal was to sketch a vision for an interface concept in smart environments. My research questions were: 1. What are the characteristics of user experience that are specific to smart environments? 2. What are users' needs and expectations for interaction in different types of smart environments? My study situates in the fields of use experience research and human-computer interaction.

I investigated the experience in smart environments with a literature review on which I based my conception of user experience in smart environments. The research indicates that the user experience in smart environments manifests itself in two levels: as an experience of the smart products and services in the environment which is the case of user experience and as an experience of the environment which is the case of experience in a more holistic sense. Based on this it can be concluded that when designing either smart products or entire smart services, both of these levels of experience must be considered.

I charted the users’ needs and expectations with focus group discussions and “idea cards” (postcards with which the users sent Father Christmas a wish for a smart service they needed). The studies showed that the users want smart environments primarily to make everyday life tasks easier by reducing the effort in them. The most prominent needs were efficacy, control and independence. Interaction was expected to be natural, easy and well adaptable for different situations and needs. Furthermore, differences in users’ needs were discovered between different types of environment. I compared home, office and public environments, and the two most different from each other were home and public environment. In the home environment independence was emphasised when in the public environment it was security.

I used the information from the literature review and the user research results in sketching an initial vision of the Space Browser which is intended as an interface application for smart environments. The purpose of the browser is to bring controllability into the interaction with a complex smart environment and promote coherence of the experience in these environments. The browser is meant to be used in all types of environments.

This thesis takes a broad view on user experience from different angles and contributes to the UX research field by increasing knowledge about user experience in smart environments. It also provides insights into the users' needs and expectations towards different types of smart environments. The results of the study can be used in design practice on both product and environment levels.

Keywords user experience, smart environment, design for user experience, human-computer interaction

TIIVISTELMÄ Tekijä Minni Kanerva

Työn julkaisuvuosi 2011

Laitos Muotoilun laitos

Koulutusohjelma Teollisen muotoilun koulutusohjelma

Työn nimi Käyttäjäkokemuksen suunnittelu älykkäissä ympäristöissä – käyttäjien tarpeiden tunnistaminen konseptisuunnittelun varhaisessa vaiheessa Opinnäytteen tyyppi Taiteen maisterin opinnäyte

Kieli englanti

Sivumäärä 74 + 6 liitesivua

Tiivistelmä Tietotekniikka on yhä enemmän sulautuneena ympäristöömme ja tulevaisuudessa saatamme elää älykkäissä ympäristöissä, jotka ymmärtävät toimintaamme ja joiden kanssa vuorovaikutamme suoraan perinteisten tietotekniikkalaitteiden sijasta. Tämä muuttaa ihmisen ja ympäristön suhdetta olennaisesti ja sillä on vaikutuksia niin kokemukseemme ympäristöstä kuin sen suunnitteluun. Käyttäjäkokemuksen teoriat keskittyvät nykyään yksittäisten tuotteiden käyttökokemukseen käsittäen ympäristön ainoastaan kokemukseen vaikuttavana kontekstina. Kun vuorovaikutus siirtyy tuotteista yhä enemmän kokonaisiin älykkäisiin ympärisöihin, on ympäristö otettava keskiöön käyttäjäkokemuksen tutkimuksessa. Tämän tutkimuksen tavoitteena oli selvittää käyttäjäkokemuksen luonnetta älykkäissä ympäristöissä ja sen seurauksia suunnittelulle. Lisäksi tavoitteena oli hahmotella visio älykkään ympäristön käyttöliittymäkonseptista. Tutkimuskysymykseni olivat: 1. Mitkä ovat älykkäille ympäristöille erityiset käyttäjäkokemuksen piirteet? 2. Mitkä ovat käyttäjien tarpeet ja odotukset vuorovaikutuksesta erityyppisissä älykkäissä ympäristöisä? Työni sijoittuu käyttäjäkokemuksen sekä ihmisen ja teknologian vuorovaikutuksen tutkimusaloihin. Selvitin älykkäiden ympäristöjen kokemusta kirjallisuuskatsauksella, minkä pohjalta muodostin käsityksen älykkäiden ympäristöjen käyttäjäkokemuksesta. Tutkimustieto osoittaa, että älykkäiden ympäristöjen käyttäjäkokemus ilmenee kahdella tasolla: ympäristössä olevien älykkäiden tuotteiden ja palveluiden kokemuksena, jolloin kyseessä on käyttäjäkokemus sekä ympäristön kokemuksena, jolloin on kyseessä kokemus kokonaisvaltaisemmassa mielessä. Tästä voi tehdä johtopäätöksen, että niin älykkäitä tuotteita kuin kokonaisia älykkäitä ympäristöjä suunniteltaessa on otettava huomioon nämä molemmat kokemuksen tasot. Käyttäjien tarpeita ja odotuksia kartoitin fokusryhmäkeskusteluilla ja ”ideakorteilla” (postikortteja, joilla käyttäjät lähettivät joulupukille toivomuksen tarvitsemastaan älykkään ympäristön palvelusta). Tutkimukset osoittivat, että käyttäjät haluavat älykkäiden ympäristöjen pääsääntöisesti helpottavan arkielämän askareita tehden niistä vaivattomampia. Eniten esiin nousseet tarpeet olivat tehokkuus, hallinta ja itsenäisyys. Vuorovaikutuksen odotettiin olevan luonnollista ja helppoa sekä eri tilanteisiin ja tarpeisiin mukautuvaa. Lisäksi erityyppisten ympäristöjen kesken oli havaittavissa eroja käyttäjien tarpeissa. Vertailussa olivat koti-, toimisto- ja julkinen ympäristö, joista koti- ja julkinen ympäristö poikkesivat toisistaan eniten. Kotiympäristössä korostui itsenäisyys ja julkisessa ympäristössä turvallisuus. Käytin kirjallisuuskatsauksesta saatuja tietoja ja käyttäjätutkimuksen tuloksia hyväkseni hahmotellessani alustavaa visiota älykkään ympäristön käyttöliittymäsovellukseksi tarkoitetusta ympäristön selainkonseptista. Selaimen tarkoituksena on tuoda hallittavuutta vuorovaikutukseen monimutkaisessa älykkäässä ympäristössä ja edesauttaa yhtenäisen käyttäjäkokemuksen muodostumista näissä ympäristöissä. Selain on tarkoitettu käytettäväksi kaikentyppisissä ympäristöissä. Tutkimukseni luo kattavan kuvan käyttäjäkokemukseen eri näkökulmista ja lisää tietämystä älykkäiden ympäristöjen käyttäjäkokemuksesta sekä käyttäjien tarpeista ja odotuksista älykkäitä ympäristöjä kohtaan. Tuloksia voidaan käyttää hyödyksi suunnittelussa sekä tuote- että ympäristötasolla.

Avainsanat käyttäjäkokemus, älykäs ympäristö, käyttäjäkokemuksen suunnittelu, ihmisen ja teknologian vuorovaikutus

PREFACE

Two years ago I started at VTT as a research trainee. One of my tasks was to write my master’s thesis as part of some project but there was no ready subject for me. As everything was very new to me I spent the first half year mainly working in different projects and getting to know the world of research and VTT. During the early times I remember coming across a strange combination of letters: “UX” and wondering what on earth it meant. I had to ask from someone.

Finally, a topic was found in the DIEM project and my exploration into user experience and smart environments begun. From the start the topic seemed very interesting but over time it proved to be very challenging. Studying experience of something that does not yet exist is paradoxical. Tangling with the unanswered questions about user experience has been hard and it has taken a longer time than I first anticipated, but it has also been very educative. After this process I am still wondering what on earth UX is, but at least I have some better understanding of the reasons why it is so difficult to grasp.

I want to thank my thesis supervisor Marketta Niemelä for giving great advices and valuable feedback during the process. From each of our meetings I left with a clear vision about the thesis subject and the next steps in the process. I am also thankful to Thomas Olsson, Minna Kynsilehto and Olli-Pekka Pohjola for additional comments. Furthermore, I want to thank Aleksi Rinta-Kauppila, Pasi Välkkynen and Tiina Kymäläinen for assisting me with the focus groups and the smart environment animation. I am thankful to VTT for giving me this opportunity to work with top research scientists, and I want to thank those scientists for being such great people to work with. The spirit at our team is one of the things I will remember the best from my time at VTT. Finally, I want to give my thanks to my family and friends for supporting me throughout this process. I want to give special thanks to my boyfriend, Alexis, who has supported and encouraged me tirelessly, and convinced me in the difficult times that “Yes, I can!”

Tampere, March 31st, 2011

Minni Kanerva

TABLE OF CONTENTSABSTRACTTIIVISTELMÄPREFACE1 INTRODUCTION.................................................................................................................................. 7 1.1 Background ............................................................................................................................ 7 1.2 Theoretical framework and research approach................................................................ 10 1.3 Research objectives.............................................................................................................. 10 1.4 Thesis outline........................................................................................................................ 10

2 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND..................................................................................................... 12 2.1 Smart environments............................................................................................................ 12 2.1.1 Characteristics of smart environments............................................................ 13 2.1.2 Designing smart environments........................................................................ 16

2.2 User experience.................................................................................................................... 18 2.2.1 The anatomy of user experience...................................................................... 19 2.2.2 Shaping the body of experience........................................................................ 25 2.2.3 User experience in smart environments.......................................................... 30 2.2.4 Designing for user experience.......................................................................... 34

3 METHODS............................................................................................................................................ 36 3.1 Introduction......................................................................................................................... 36 3.2 Focus groups......................................................................................................................... 38 3.3 “Idea cards”............................................................................................................................ 39 3.4 Analysis of the material....................................................................................................... 40

4 RESULTS................................................................................................................................................ 41 4.1 Users’ needs ......................................................................................................................... 41 4.2 User expectations for interaction in smart environments.............................................. 46 4.3 Comparing home, office and public environments.......................................................... 52 4.4 Discussion of the results..................................................................................................... 56

5 APPLYING THE RESULTS................................................................................................................. 59 5.1 Active layer and tracking.................................................................................................... 61 5.2 Viewing and saving information....................................................................................... 63 5.3 Searching information ....................................................................................................... 64 5.4 Manipulating the environment.......................................................................................... 64

6 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS............................................................................................... 66

REFERENCES.......................................................................................................................................... 70APPENDIXES

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1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background

We are living in a world that is becoming increasingly embedded with information and communication (ICT) technologies. Computers are already everywhere and people have access to digital information almost anywhere thanks to mobile devices and wireless networks. Our everyday objects from cars to toys are having computing more and more embedded in them. Many visions for the future describe ecologies of these technologies and devices which can be called smart environments. The most famous one of these is Mark Weiser’s ubiquitous computing vision from 1991 (Weiser 1991). He envisioned a world of interconnected devices which would render the computer ”invisible” but present everywhere and natural to use.

Currently the technological development is going towards smart environments but it is not as fast as the development of the technologies that enable them. So far, we do not yet have actual smart environments but only applications of ubiquitous computing. The technologies in future smart environments will offer new possibilities for direct interaction with the environment. The fact that the physical environment will have intelligent properties will change people’s relationship with it since the environment will have some human-like qualities and can appear as a ”living” and conscious thing when it is able to monitor people and understand their actions and intentions or feelings.

The terms that are used in the research and design of smart environments have overlapping meanings and are used in reference to similar subjects. The term I will mostly use in this thesis is smart environment. Ubiquitous, embedded or pervasive computing and ambient intelligence are terms that are all widely used to describe the type of technologies enabling smart environments. The technologies are more or less synonymous with each other but they bare a fundamental difference to the concept of smart environment. The difference

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is that they are naming a type of technology when the term smart environment is naming a type of environment. Ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence are technologies that are in the environment but they are not an environment. One single application can be an example of ubiquitous computing or artificial intelligence but it does not yet constitute a smart environment. In this thesis my focus is on the environment as a whole, hence the term smart environment. Lastly, for the sake of consistency with the DIEM project I will use the term smart environment because it is the term used in the project and my thesis will be part of it. To conclude, in this thesis I will use ubiquitous computing when referring to the technologies used in smart environment, unless I am discussing some particular technology, and smart environment when referring to the environment or space which incorporates these ubiquitous technologies. The concept of user is wider in this thesis than normally. Firstly, it refers to people who are using the smart services and are in interaction with the smart environments. Secondly, it refers also to people who might not use the service but who still are in the smart environments.

Smart environments will develop gradually and by different actors. The environment will never be fully complete and it will continue changing as technologies develop and offer always new possibilities. There is a danger that these environments will become overloaded with information, complicated and difficult to use if they are not carefully designed. They might also not respond to people’s actual needs which would result in people experiencing them as useless or annoying. It is important that the smart environments are designed to fulfil real needs of people and to give a positive user experience (UX, sometimes also UE). Kaasinen et al. (2007) argue that smart environments should be designed with a holistic view on the environment and people’s relationship with it. User experience takes such a holistic view which makes it potentially a good model to be used in the design of particular smart environments.

The problem with designing for UX in smart environments is the fact that they do not yet exist. To get knowledge about experience beforehand is challenging, especially as there is nothing equivalent to smart environments which could be observed, and it is often impossible to build an entire environment for studying users in it. UX theories have also mainly concentrated on user’s relationship with products. While this does not prevent us from using that knowledge in designing smart environments – and a large part of the theories are directly applicable also to them – there is still a significant difference between

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a product and an environment. There is not much research on UX in smart environments and few knowledge about how the experience is formed in such environments. To be able to design for UX in smart environments it is essential to know the special characteristics of experiencing environment and its “smartness”.

My thesis is part of the DIEM (Devices and Interoperability Ecosystem) project coordinated by TIVIT and part of the Finnish ICT SHOK program. I am participating in the project as a member of Human-technology interaction for well-being team at the ICT cluster in VTT. The DIEM project is developing a system architecture that will enable the realisation of environments where different devices can communicate with each other and operate together in multiple ways. The devices can send and receive information between each other which enables new kinds of services and applications. One property of this system is locality. The services exist in specific physical locations and they make use of location-based information.

My design topic focuses on the concept of interface for smart environments. The purpose is to bring consistency to various smart environments by means of a generic interface which would present the smart services and applications in a way that promotes understanding of them as a unified digital layer or a counterpart of the physical environment. It would also make the environments more controllable for the user since it would give a window to the smart services that are available in the current space but can be so well incorporated in the environment that they are not easily perceivable otherwise. I call this interface application the Space Browser.

Due to the scope of the thesis and its theoretical emphasis, I am further focusing on the function of presenting the services in the environment through the Space Browser and leaving other possible functionalities out. On the other hand, I am applying it for different kinds of environments since the core idea of the browser is to be truly generic. The Space Browser is linked to a physical interaction concept called Phi/o Fusion under development at VTT. This technical interaction concept and demo is a tool for modifying a smart environment ad hoc by connecting smart objects with each other and defining the input and output functions freely. An example could be defining that when a TV is switched on the stereos would turn off if they were on. I present a visionary concept idea for the Space Browser which is intended to be realisable in the future. In order to contribute to the Phi/o Fusion project I also present a version of the browser that can be realised with available technologies.

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1.2 Theoretical framework and research approach

This is a theory based scientific thesis situating in the fields of UX research and human-computer interaction (HCI). UX research aims at understanding the complex phenomenon of experiencing and to provide models and tools for designing of products, systems or services. The theoretical basis of my thesis is on theories and frameworks of user experience which explain the process of experiencing and the elements affecting experience. I have applied these theories in the field of HCI and interaction design in particular. The design approach of my thesis is human-centred design. I have gathered information from users with qualitative research methods in the early concept creation phase of an interaction concept.

1.3 Research objectives

This thesis investigates both smart environments and user experience. The goal of the thesis is to understand user experience in smart environments and to sketch an early interaction concept for a universal space browser application. My two main research questions are:

1. What are the characteristics of user experience that are specific to smart environments?2. What are users’ needs and expectations for interaction in different types of smart environments?

To answer the first question I analysed UX theories and the concept of smart environment. I identified the elements affecting user experience that have significance from an environmental perspective. For the second question I analysed material gathered from users in focus group discussions and with an “idea cards” method. Finally, I applied the research results in the concept creation process.

1.4 Thesis outline

The chapter 2 contains literature review and it is divided in to parts: in 2.1 I present smart environments. In section 2.1.1 I describe their characteristics from a technological point of view and in section 2.1.2 I discuss the development of smart environments in a general level. 2.2 is devoted to user experience. I begin in 2.2.1 by analysing the phenomenon of experiencing as a mental process, which I call the anatomy of experience, and the section

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2.2.2 deals with theories about the elements affecting user experience. 2.2.3 analyses the special characteristics of user experience in smart environments and 2.2.4 concludes the chapter by reviewing theories and practice of designing for user experience. The chapter 3 presents the methods of this study and chapter 4 the results of the user research. In chapter 5 I apply the results of the user study and the literature review in an initial concept sketch for a Space Browser application. Finally, the chapter 6 contains the overall discussion and conclusions of this study.

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2 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

2.1 Smart environments

Smart environments have existed in technological ICT visions since the late 20th century. The smartness is normally described as a feature of the technological environment. Das & Cook define smart environment as

one that is able to acquire and apply knowledge about an environment and also to adapt to its

inhabitants in order to improve their experience in that environment. (Cook & Das 2005, p. 3).

Streitz (2006) distinguishes system-oriented smartness, which means autonomously acting environments from people-oriented smartness which means enabling people to make smart decisions. He argues that smart environments will have a combination of both types of smartness, but that the design of smart environments should be directed in a people-oriented way.

Kaasinen et al. (2007) take a non-technical view on smart environments. They define smart environment as a result of joint operation of human and environment, where the intelligence is not only a quality of the technology or the environment but it manifests as adaptability of the system formed by human, techniques and environment. In a similar way, Williams et al. (2005) and Dourish (2006) describe that spaces do not exist only because they have a physical embodiment but because they become meaningful through people’s encounters with them.

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2.1.1 Characteristics of smart environments

Kaasinen et al. (2007) have defined the characteristics of smart environments under three well summarised categories: ubiquitous computing, computational intelligence and advanced interaction. I will follow the same division and present the characteristics under these titles.

Ubiquitous computingMark Weiser is considered to be the founder of ubiquitous computing. His article “The computer for the 21st century” published in 1991 in the Scientific American is mentioned in almost any writing of smart environments. In Weiser’s vision the computer has become invisible and is working in the background. He describes the smartness as interaction between many different devices. In Weiser’s account the most important benefit of ubiquitous computing is in natural interaction. This is still one of the main characteristics of smart environments.

Ubiquitous computing consists of distributed and embedded computing and comprehensive network infrastructure where wireless networks are essential. Miniature computers are incorporated in the environment in any objects, devices and structures. These computers are very simple and very limited in their processing capacity. Examples of such computers are radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags that can contain a small amount of data and send or receive it via radio waves, and sensors that can receive information from the physical environment such as pressure, touch, temperature, humidity etc. and transform it into digital information. (e.g. Posland 2009 and Cook & Das 2005.)

These enhanced objects are also connected to each other and the Internet with either high-speed wired technologies or, more importantly in the future, with different kinds of wireless communication technologies. Such technologies include near field communication (NFC), infrared and Bluetooth for short-range communication between devices, wireless local area network (WLAN) for medium-range communication and mobile connectivity such as the current 3G and satellite technology, of which global positioning system (GPS) is the most important application, for long-distance and mobile communication. With the use of these technologies all objects can communicate with each other independent of their location. They will form the Internet of Things which can be seen as a materialisation of the Internet. (e.g. Posland 2009 and ITU Internet Reports 2005.)

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In the Internet the concept of physical location does not exist – the same information can be accessed anywhere in the connected world and the same “information space” exists everywhere at the same time. Smart environments can “localise” the Internet by restricting the access to some information to be available only in the actual physical space. This information would be something that is related to the particular physical space, its activities and objects, and irrelevant elsewhere. The Internet of things is a term used of a network of interconnected material objects in space where each object which is embedded with a tiny computer is associated with its own web address and in that way serves as a physical link to the page in the Internet and to other objects. These links normally contain some relevant information about the object or its physical surroundings. (ibid.)

Augmented reality (AR) is also an important technology in smart environments. It is closely related to virtual reality and is a way of combining it with the material reality. Augmented reality overlays digital information onto the physical environment in a way that it appears to be in the environment. This mixture of real and virtual is viewed through a display device such as a mobile phone that shows the real environment and the digital information in real-time. The biggest advantages of AR applications are in the mobile use so they are mostly used with mobile phones or head-mounted displays. (e.g. Posland 2009.)

Computational intelligenceThe prefix “smart” in smart environments directly implies that there must be some artificial intelligence (AI) involved. The computational intelligence manifests itself as intelligence of both the services or applications and their interoperability. The level of human intelligence is still very far from the reach of artificial intelligence but already lower-level intelligence enables construction of systems that are for example able to make decisions independently, adapt to different situations based on observations of its surroundings and predict events. (e.g. Posland 2009 and Cook & Das 2005.) Context-aware systems are able to understand the state of their environment and people in it as well as other systems that they are connected to. Based on the knowledge they receive from these situations they can adapt their behaviours accordingly. (Dey 2000.)

With the contextual knowledge and sufficiently developed logic the systems are able to learn to better adapt to the user’s behaviours and preferences in time. Learning systems and environments monitor events, remember them and develop according to the consequences. The learning can happen either automatically or by active teaching. When the systems are either intelligent from the start or systems that have learned to recognise

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the user’s intentions they are able to make autonomous decisions and act proactively. Such environments can offer the services automatically to the user without the need to search or require them. There are still many challenges in recognising the users’ changing contexts and desires and the best potential for applying proactivity is in environments that are familiar to the user. (Kaasinen et al. 2007.)

Advanced interactionThe most prominent property of smart environments from the user perspective is the new interaction paradigm it imposes. Since the computer has dissolved everywhere in the environment and does not always contain a screen and a keyboard anymore, a new way of interaction is needed. Naturalness is a central feature in interaction. Since the environment can sense people in many ways, the interaction can happen by using gestures, voice, movement or direct manipulation of the physical objects. Weiser already said that

These hundreds of computers will come to be invisible to common awareness. People will simply use

them unconsciously to accomplish everyday tasks. (Weiser 1991).

This kind of interaction is called implicit human-computer interaction (iHCI) in contrast to explicit interaction which is the traditional HCI paradigm.

Schmidt (2000) coined the term iHCI and defines it as

an action, performed by the user that is not primarily aimed to interact with a computerized system

but which such a system understands as input.

He compares it to the communication between people where a large part of interaction is non-verbal, such as gestures, body language and voice. Badia et al. (2009) note that in iHCI users do not have prior knowledge about the interaction type. The environment then needs to have some understanding of the user’s behaviour and context in order to respond to the natural input which is not necessarily aimed at interacting with the system (Posland 2009).

If iHCI is understood in a wider sense, it does not necessarily require the disappearance of the computer nor such interaction which is not intended to happen with a computer. In many visions (e.g. Rehman et al. 2002) ubiquitous computing has been understood as disappearing computing where the computer is so completely incorporated in the environment through miniaturisation that it is totally invisible. Some researchers, though, disagree with this conception. Tomie et al. (2002) challenge the idea of perceptual invisibility in ubiquitous computing visions by introducing the concept of “invisibility in use”. The technology does not need to be invisible to the senses to be “calm” and

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unobtrusive. The key is in making the devices and objects support the user’s activities so well that the user does not have to think about the object or interaction. Here the implicitness comes from the routine nature of interaction which leads to such fluency that the device can “disappear”.

Natural interaction includes multimodality. Multimodal interfaces enable interaction with several modalities such as gestures, voice, touch and movement. This makes the interaction more flexible since it gives the user the freedom to choose the modality that best suits him/her. Several alternative modalities also benefit a wide group of users, since people with disabilities are more likely to find a way to interact with systems that offer a series of possibilities than with systems that are restricted to one single interaction method. (Oviatt 2008.)

Incorporating computing into everyday objects enables tangible interaction methods. Tangible user interfaces (TUIs) are physical embodiments of digital information. Users are interacting with the system by manipulating objects in the physical world instead of virtual objects on a computer screen with a graphical user interface. The representation and control are combined in a tangible interface object which can make interaction more intuitive. (Sears & Jacko 2008 and Ishii & Ulmer 1997.) Tangible interfaces have been most popularly applied in the fields of music and edutainment but also in other areas such as planning, information visualisation and social communication (see e.g. an extensive survey on tangible user interfaces by Shaer and Hornecker, 2009).

2.1.2 Designing smart environments

There is a difference between the development of technologies and the development of smart environments. Technologies can be developed from their own premises and at a speed that is dependent only what is possible. The development of smart environments cannot be directed by only what is possible in a technological sense because they have to be built on already existing environments and be accepted by people. The problem in the current development of smart environments is the fact that it is too technology-driven. When users and their needs are not the driving force in the design of smart environments they have a risk to not succeed in fulfilling the original visions of making people’s lives

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easier. (Aarts & Grotenhuis 2009.) This is why smart environments must be developed in a human-driven way. However, when the development follows human requirements it is necessarily slower because it is dependent on development of people’s values and attitudes which is always considerably slower than the development of technologies.

Kaasinen et al. (2007) emphasise the changing and emergent nature of smart environments. They refer the design of smart environments to urban planning which is always done in connection to the existing infrastructures and which is never finished. Smart environments can be understood as digital layers or counterparts of physical cities as they need complex underlying structures and need to be built gradually. For example the building of communication networks can be compared with building of a road infrastructure. Smart environments are also developed by multidisciplinary groups and including multiple stakeholders, which is also similar to urban planning. Kaasinen et al. (2007) however note that urban environments, unlike smart environments, have well established forms and relationships with people. The formation of smart environments remains still unpredictable since there are no such relationships yet.

Furthermore, the design of smart environments exists in multiple levels simultaneously and the different levels are affecting each other. When designing devices and services to be incorporated in the environment the underlying infrastructure must be taken into account as well as the social and cultural implications. On the other hand the infrastructure should be designed so that it enables the development and implementation of the services in the best possible way. This is a dialogue between rapid development of services and long-term development of the basic infrastructure. (Kaasinen et al. 2006.)

The problem is that one designer cannot have the same kind of control over the environment that s/he has with a single product. When products are designed as part of the smart environment the changing nature and incompleteness of it has to be taken into account. As the technologies are constantly under development it is not possible to wait for their perfection because in that case the development would halt. It is a question of a kind of chicken or egg dilemma which may be one reason for the slow realisation of smart environments. The slow development of NFC applications is one example of such a dilemma: The applications consist of two components – RFID tags that are incorporated in objects and tag readers that recognise the tags. The both technologies are fully ready

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and feasible for commercial production but there are still very few tag reader devices (this can be a feature in a mobile phone for example) because of the lack of tagged objects – and vice-versa. Hence, this would call for collaboratively coordinated development across industries.

2.2 User experience

User experience has been an important research topic in the field of product and interaction design since the 1990’s. It stems from usability research which aims to improve the efficiency, easiness and ergonomics in the use of a product. Usability concentrates in the instrumental aspects of product use and sees the use of a product as a goal-oriented, pragmatic process. A product with good usability is easy to learn and to use, ergonomic and executes its intended tasks efficiently with minimal amount of errors made by the user.

Satisfaction is a concept included in the usability approach and as a feeling it has a relationship to UX. Still, it is limited to a goal-oriented attitude towards a product as a utility. The user’s overall experience related to a product is a much more complex phenomenon which is affected not only by the product but also by the user’s mental state, feelings, attitudes, values and the context of use to mention a few. Jordan (2000) was one of the first to recognise the need for this wider perspective. He argues that satisfaction is concentrating on the avoidance of discomfort and that a pleasure-based approach is needed in order to get a holistic picture of people’s relationship with products.

Usability is still an important aspect of product and interaction design but UX approach complements it with knowledge about other components of experience. Generally UX is perceived to include usability as one part of it, but Roto (2007) has made a clear distinction between usability and UX. She argues that the part of usability which measures actual objective efficiency of product use is not part of UX since experience covers only perceived efficiency which is the subjective part of usability.

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Knowledge about UX is expected to enable the design of products that produce better experiences for users. In order to get a holistic view on UX it must be approached from two different angles:

What is experience as a phenomenon inside the user’s mind

What affects the nature and quality of UX

The first question belongs to the field of psychology. In HCI and design research the question is much less discussed and the researchers generally base their conceptions of experience on psychological theories. Regarding the scope and purpose of this study it is sufficient to rely on these interpretations in forming an understanding of experience. Most frameworks of UX in the HCI and design research literature present experience as a single term without profoundly explaining its essence. These frameworks rather aim at depicting what aspects affect the experience and they are meant as tools for design. Roto (2006.) In the next two sections I will discuss both of the questions separately.

2.2.1 The anatomy of user experience

Forlizzi & Ford (2000) created one of the earliest frameworks of experience. They do not use the term user experience but the focus is still on the use of products. The understanding of the term experience can be divided into three categories: experience, an experience and experience as story. Experience is the constant stream happening in our consciousness. An experience on the other hand is an event that has a beginning and an end and it changes the user and perhaps the context of experience. The experience as story is related to memories and giving meaning to an experience. It is also used to communicate experiences to others. All of these categories are present in the process of UX.

sub-consciousness storytelling

cognition narrative

an experience

experience experience as story

meaning

Figure 1. An initial framework of product experience as it relates to interaction design (Forlizzi &

Ford 2000, 421)

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The framework also defines four dimensions of experience explaining what does experience mean and what is its nature in different levels of the human mind. These four dimensions are sub-consciousness, cognition, narrative and storytelling. Sub-conscious experiences stay in the background when we are using familiar products and doing routine tasks that we do not have to concentrate on while doing them. Cognition is on the second level of consciousness and defines experiences that require thinking about what we are doing. This happens with new or confusing products and tasks that require attention. A narrative experience is a formalised experience and the storytelling experience is on the highest mental level giving meaning to experiences. It is the experience after being reflected upon and made personal by relating it to aspects that have personal significance. It is also a way to communicate experiences to others.

When there is a change from sub-conscious or narrative to cognitive experience the person is having An experience. The user is consciously involved in an action and as a result either the user, context or both are changed. An experience can be identified as a separate event having a beginning and an end. When a sub-conscious or narrative experience change to storytelling experience the user adds meaning to the experience, makes it her own and communicates it with others. This is a result of sense-making (Wright et al. 2004) which I will describe later in this chapter.

Forlizzi and Battarbee (2004) have later modified the framework of experience to be better suited for understanding experience of interaction in social context. When their earlier model described what is experience in a more general sense the later model describes user-product interactions in particular. This requires some changes to the concepts in the initial framework. Instead of four dimensions of experience the new model had three types of interaction, as the narrative experience was discarded. Fluent interaction in the new model corresponds to the sub-conscious experience in the old model of experience, expressive interaction corresponds to storytelling experience and cognitive interaction

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corresponds to cognitive experience. The categories of experience that the interactions evoke stayed the same for experience and an experience but to emphasise the social side of experience they changed experience as story to co-experience. In co-experience the sense-making is a social process and the experience is created together or shared with others.

Figure 2. The dynamics of experience in interaction (Forlizzi & Battarbee 2004, 264)

Wright et al. (2004) have analysed experience by dividing it into four threads and six ways of making sense in experience. The four threads of experience, the compositional, the sensual, the emotional and the spatio-temporal thread, describe experience from different viewpoint each. They occur simultaneously but they can be seen as describing different levels of experience. The Compositional thread has a narrative character. It can be seen as an understanding of structures and components of interaction and the object that the interaction is happening with. The sensual thread is about the immediate feelings the user experiences in a sensory engagement in a situation. The emotional thread sums up the experience. It differs from the sensual thread in that instead of being passive reactions to situations it is a result of processed feelings and intellectual analysis. The spatio-temporal thread is related to the sense of space and time and their effect on experience.

The four threads are not enough to describe experiencing because people do not simply receive experiences as ready-made. According to Wright et al. (2004) the actual experience is created through a sense-making process which can be divided into six

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sub-categories: anticipating, connecting, interpreting, reflecting, appropriating and recounting. These processes do not have a linear cause and effect relationship but instead they can go on simultaneously and affect each other in various ways. The first three processes go on mostly before or during the interaction.

Anticipating begins before interaction when the user has expectations about it. However, it is not limited to the pre-interaction phase. Expectations change during interaction and remain afterwards as anticipations for the possible next interaction. Connecting is the immediate, pre-conceptual understanding the user has when s/he engages in a situation. By connecting the user is able to orientate and operate in the situation. Interpreting is the third process that happens during interaction. It is the most basic process of giving meaning to what is happening.

The last three processes continue also after interaction and they can be thought of as finalising the process of experiencing and creating the overall user experience that includes all use cases. In reflecting the user makes judgements about the experience both during and after interaction. S/he evaluates the pragmatic aspects of the interaction as well as his/her feelings about it and how well it matches his/her expectations. In appropriating the experience is related to earlier experiences and the sense of self which makes it personal. Recounting is about storytelling. It is how experiences are remembered and communicated to others.

Many theories of UX stress the importance of emotion or affect (e.g. Mahlke 2005 and Hassenzahl & Tractinsky 2006). Desmet and Hekkert (2007) base their framework of product experience on emotion psychology and theories of affect. They place emotional experience at the highest hierarchical level of their model with aesthetic experience and experience of meaning at the lower level. They argue that even though all of the three components may influence each other, emotional experience is resulting from the two lower-level experiences. Aesthetic experience is closely related to the sensory thread of Wright et al. (2004). Both are about feelings evoked by stimulation of senses. Experience of meaning consists of cognitive processes such as interpretation, memory retrieval and associations. Hence, it seems to have many similarities with the six sense-making processes of Wright et al. (2004). Desmet & Hekkert conclude that emotional experience is the result of interpreting the situation of interaction and evaluating the lower level experiences. They remark however that the processes described in the framework are limited to the actual interaction unlike the sense-making processes of Wright et al. (2004).

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Figure 3. Framework of product experience (Desmet & Hekkert 2007, 60)

Finally, the UX framework of Kort et al. (2007) combines the models of Wright et al. (2004) and Desmet and Hekkert (2007). This model consists of three lower level experience aspects that develop into the resulting emotion by the six sense-making processes. The three experience aspects, compositional, aesthetic and aspects of meaning, are derived from both the four threads of experience of Wright et al. and Desmet and Hekkert’s experience components. The compositional aspects correspond to the compositional thread of Wright et al. and describe the user’s understanding of interaction. They relate to pragmatic and behavioural characteristics in the use of a product. Since Desmet and Hekkert have concentrated on the higher level emotional aspects of experience, the compositional aspects are not included in their framework. Instead, the aesthetic aspects and aspects of meaning are derived from their framework. Aesthetic aspects correspond to the sensual thread of Wright et al. describing immediate feelings during interaction, and the aspects of meaning have similarities with the emotional thread relating to symbolic values and identification.

Figure 4. UX framework (Kort et al. 2007, 58)

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The key difference between the usability and UX approaches is in the way they see experience. The usability research limits its focus on the compositional aspects of experience which relate to goal-oriented task execution, when UX research takes a broader view on the experience concentrating on the emotional aspects and the user’s overall relationship with the product.

Figure 5. The anatomy of experience. My synthesis on the theories. The emotion emerges from the

boundary between an exeperience and it’s elaboration, the experience as story.

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2.2.2 Shaping the body of experience

Describing the anatomy of experience gives us understanding of what the experience is as a mental process. It is not, however, enough to enable us to design for experiences. As an analogy, the anatomy of human body for example explains the basic structure and functions of a human but it does not tell us anything about people’s individual physical traits. In order to know how a particular experience gets its shape we need to know what affects experience. Especially in designing for user experience it is important to know those elements, how they are related to each other and which of them are elements that the designer can have control over. In the case of a single product it can be relatively simple to identify requirements for design but when designing complex systems like smart environments it becomes essential to know how the experience of such a system is constructed and what is the role of different elements in it. Ideally, the smart space should be designed so that the user experiences it as a unified entity even though there are several different kinds of products and services offered by different providers independently. This is a real challenge.

The majority of UX frameworks in HCI and design research concentrate on the question of what affects user experience. Different models approach user experience from different angles. They may for example emphasise the role of product or time in relation to user experience depending on the main interest of research. Some models are more comprehensive than others but most of them have a similar basic structure. The fundamental elements constituting a unified model of UX that I have found when comparing different models are product, user, context and time.

The simplest models consist of two components, user and product. These models are normally product-centred and they concentrate on the properties of the product as the source of experience. The traditional usability research has been limited mainly on these two components and studied efficacy in the use of products. The UX research has added emotional aspects to this and is interested in product qualities that create emotional responses. The third component in UX models is context. Many of the UX models include these three parts. The final component is time. This has not been considered in all models, but it is clear that time affects UX. Next I will explain each of these components in more detail.

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ProductIn some models the concept of product has been extended in including services and systems to the same category (e.g. Roto 2006). Here I will use the word product in reference to all of these.

Hassenzahl (2001 and 2004a) has studied how different qualities of a product affect user experience in different ways. He groups all product qualities under two categories: pragmatic and hedonic. Pragmatic qualities are goal-related attributes in the product and its use, which is the domain of usability. Hedonic qualities are related to the users’ self and relate to the emotional affects the product can elicit. He further divides hedonic quality to stimulation which is related to sensorial and intellectual pleasures and identification which is related to the user’s sense of identity and values, and their communication. Different qualities are emphasised in different products, and users form judgements about the products based on their perceptions of how well the qualities of a particular product fit its purpose. These judgements then lead to emotional and behavioural consequences, which is the way products affect user experience according to Hassenzahl. Mahlke (2007) has also studied the effects of pragmatic and hedonic aspects in product use and concluded that even though hedonic product qualities have an effect on emotional reactions, usability is still the major cause of them.

Product is the agent affecting UX over which the designer has the most control. The way a product is perceived through different senses (sight, touch, hearing, smell and with some products also taste) directly creates emotional responses in users. Jääskö et al. (2003) list style, technological level, product features and trends as the elements affecting the desirability of a product. They also point out that products have to be viewed in relation to other products in the market.

UserOn the user’s side the factors shaping experience are more complex and often out of reach of the designer’s control. Before use people have expectations based on their knowledge, prior experiences, needs, goals and values. These elements direct people’s motivation in regards to the use of a product. For example values alone can determine whether a person

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will even try some product or not. During and after use the user evaluates how the actual experience corresponds to his/her expectations and this will lead to modified expectations and new experiences (Kankainen 2002).

Figure 6. A conceptual model of user experience (Kankainen 2002, 32)

Hassenzahl (2007, 2008) has analysed users’ different goals and divided them in two categories: do-goals and be-goals. In do-goals the goal determines the action and the product is “a means to an end” serving the user’s instrumental needs. Be-goals are higher-level goals relating to the user’s self, to something the user wants to be such as “competent”, “related to others” or “special”. These different goals are not exclusionary, instead do-goals often serve the less conscious be-goals. Hassenzahl gives phone call as an example where the do-goal is to actually make the call and the be-goal is to be related to others. The goals are related to product qualities so that do-goals are supported by pragmatic qualities and be-goals are supported by hedonic qualities.

Be-goals are perhaps more generally called basic human needs. It is widely agreed among UX researchers that the fulfilment of needs is an important factor in creating positive user experiences. The most famous theory of needs is Maslow’s (1954) Theory of Personality where he identifies five universal needs: physical health, security, self-esteem, belongingness and self-actuation. Later, many researchers in the fields of psychology and HCI have studied needs and categorised them in different ways. Especially the hierarchical organisation of the needs has been widely criticised (Sheldon et al. 2001). Through comparative analysis of different theories of needs Hassenzahl et al. (2010) have created a list of seven basic needs that are derived from the ten needs listed by Sheldon et al. (2001). These seven needs which Hassenzahl et al. consider to be the most important in the context of experiences with technology are competence, relatedness, popularity, stimulation, meaning, security, and autonomy.

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The basic needs are affecting in a subconscious level and they are more general than the conscious, more concrete needs that users have in relation to products and interaction. These more instrumental needs can be divided into two categories: needs originating from problems that have to be solved and needs that present as desires which come from opportunities for improvement (Kujala 2008). Sheldon et al. have found proof by their research to the hierarchical order of these two types of needs which they call, according to Wahba & Bridwell, “deficiency” or “security” needs and “enhancement” or “growth” needs (Wahba & Bridwell 1976; ref. Sheldon et al. 2001, p. 337). They suggest that the deficiency needs must be satisfied before the enhancement needs occur, but they continue that further research is needed to validate their suggestion.

ContextThe third component in the UX models is context which appears in the majority of models. Context is important since the interaction with a product always happens in a particular situation which affects the experience. Dey & Abowd (1999) define that:

Context is any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. An entity

is a person, place, or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an

application, including the user and applications themselves.

Roto (2006) divides context into four sub-categories: physical, social, temporal and task context. Physical context relates to location and the physical conditions in the environment. It is the immediate environment the user can perceive with his/her senses. The effects of the physical context are often very bodily, such as sound, lighting or temperature conditions. Social context relates to user’s relationship with other people at the current situation. This involves for example accepted behavioural norms. Social context does not need to limit around the people that are in the same physical space. It also includes situations where communication happens across distances. Temporal context relates to the time available for executing a task, and task context relates to the higher-level goals that the user’s current task is aiming at. The user may also have several simultaneous task contexts.

Hassenzahl validates his model of pragmatic and hedonic product qualities by several user studies. In one study (Hassenzahl 2004a) he divided the users into two groups, where one half was given a task to complete and the other group were told just to have fun with the product. The aim of this study was to prove that users perceive pragmatic and hedonic

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qualities independently of each other but it shows also how different contexts, in this case the task context, affect the user experience. Hassenzahl states that

Using a product with a particular character in a particular situation will lead to consequences…

(Hassenzahl 2004a, p. 322) (boldfacing by the author)

but he does not discuss it further. However, this can be understood as one proof that context is affecting experience.

TimeMany theories of UX understand that the experience is developing through time as the user is developing his/her relationship with the product. Some of the models emphasise the actual moment of interaction as the source of experience even though prior experiences would also have an effect on it. Vyas & van der Veer (2006) argue that final experience, as presented in the previous chapter, is formed through the sense-making process during which the user is giving meaning to the experience. The user interprets the experience during interaction which may change the immediate experience from the moment of interaction, but the experience is still highly related to the moment of interaction.

Other models treat the current moment of interaction more equally with moments outside of interaction. Forlizzi & Battarbee (2004) talk about the scalability of experience. They distinguish small experiences occurring during interaction from the larger experiences which build upon these small experiences in time and so affects the development of the relationship between the user and product. Roto (2006) talks about a holistic user experience which includes not only the interaction in use cases and the small experiences developed from them but also the times outside of the interaction when the user gets information about the product in other ways.

Karapanos et al. (2008, 2009) have studied the effects of time on user experience. They found out that the qualities that were important to users changed over time as the relationship between the user and product developed. The effect of stimulation, which is an important factor for purchasing a product, became weaker in time and identification and usefulness became stronger. In other words the “wow” effect loses its power when the product becomes more familiar and it becomes replaced with qualities which make the product meaningful and useful for the user.

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Figure 7. Temporality of experience (Karapanos 2009, 732)

2.2.3 User experience in smart environments

This section is partly based on a section in a co-authored chapter “User expectations for Ambient Intelligence” for a publication Promises for 2010 - ISTAG Report Revisited. ISTAG report was an EU research report on the future of ambient intelligence published in 2001. It contains four scenarios aiming at the year 2010 and considerations for their implications to societies. The chapter is currently under review process, and if accepted, will be published by IOS PRESS Amsterdam in the series Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments. The publication is anticipated to be released in May 2011.

UX research has concentrated mainly on user’s interaction with products and services instead of whole environments. The frameworks and models of user experience have also been created from the perspective of products, information applications or services. While these frameworks can be applied also for understanding experience in smart environments there are some significant differences in the way people experience environments compared to products. Because of this some elements in the user experience frameworks must be given a higher importance than in the case of product experience.

Roto (2006) makes a difference between “user experience” and “experience”. In her definition user experience requires the possibility of the user to manipulate or control the product (or system as Roto calls it) in a two-way interaction. This makes the person a user. Experience is a broader concept including all other ways people are experiencing the world they are living in and this can be described as experiencing the context. When studying

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and designing smart environments both types of experience must be taken into account. On the one hand smart environments consist of devices and provide different services with which users can be in interaction. These interactions create user experiences. On the other hand the smart products and their interoperation create a physical smart environment, and people are part of it, experiencing it whether they are in interaction with the products or not. Furthermore, many of the technological systems in smart environments do not require human interaction but work autonomously, still changing the environment and affecting people’s experience. For example in the ISTAG scenario ‘Carmen’ the ambient intelligence system autonomously monitors traffic and air pollution in the city and adjusts the maximum speeds of all cars accordingly thus affecting the experience of not only car drivers but all people in the city (ISTAG 2001). Here it is appropriate to talk about experience without the prefix “user”.

This also means that the relationship of people with smart environments is not only a relationship of a user and a system. People use the services provided by the environments but they do not “use” the environments themselves. Instead they live and are in them, and in the same time live with the smart systems that inhabit the environments. (Kuutti et al. 2007.) Hallnäs & Redström (2002) discuss the shift from use to presence in people’s relation with interactive products. They explain presence as a status of computational products which is achieved when people have incorporated them to be part of their lives. These products are no longer tools but expressionals that have special value to the owners and are present in a more profound sense than mere tools. This calls for a holistic understanding of experience where the term “user” is understood in a wider sense. The ubiquity of the technology also requires that the smart services are designed not only for those who are using and owning them but taking account also other people who are not using them but share the environment with them (Kuutti et al. 2007).

The user experience of smart environments occurs in two levels. On the one hand there is the user experience of smart systems and on the other hand people can have an experience of the environment as an ensemble of all the smart systems. Mark (1999) has suggested the possibility of people having metaphors for active spaces in the future. Pentland (2005) proposes a butler metaphor for smart rooms which would act discretely in the background but always ready to help. Wright & Steventon (2004) suggest the possibility that the environment is experienced as “intelligent” world. However, a conscious experience of the smart environment requires that the systems and their ensemble are designed in a way that it can be perceived as a unified entity. Otherwise people will only experience different separate products and services in the environment.

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iHCI can potentially make smart environments easy to use for people who do not have experience in using ICT technologies since they do not have to learn new skills or understand computers, but this is possible only if the environment has enough understanding of the users in order to react correctly to their behaviour. Errors in interpreting user behaviour might increase the users’ confusion if they are not aware that they are interacting with a smart system and are unable to detect the reason of malfunction. The examples of implicit interaction included in the ISTAG scenarios mainly relate to the environments reacting to users’ movements in the space (e.g. in ‘Maria’: opening of the car door as Maria is approaching it or adaptation of the hotel room to her preferences as she enters it, or in ‘Annette and Solomon’: recognition of people and initiation of communication between ambient intelligence and people when entering the room). In ‘Carmen’ iHCI is also illustrated when Carmen’s action of taking her shopping out of a smart delivery box initiates the payment from her account and deletes the items from her shopping list. (ISTAG 2001.)

Implicitness of interaction has been one of the main goals in AmI visions from the beginning. Mark Weiser (1991) for example anticipated that

...these hundreds of computers will come to be invisible to common awareness. People will simply use

them unconsciously to accomplish everyday tasks.

A natural feeling human interface is also one user requirement in smart environments described in the ISTAG report. Badia et al. (2009) have studied the effects of explicit and implicit interaction on user experience and found out that with implicit interaction the users had a weaker experience that they were in an interactive environment even if the environment responded similarly to the both ways of interaction. This infers that the more hidden and natural the interaction is the more difficult it may be for the user to perceive the effects of interaction. Geven et al. (2007) have studied the use of NFC applications which enable hiding the technology, and their results showed that the invisibility caused problems for the users since they were not able to make a correct mental model of the system.

Ubiquitous technologies enable tangible interaction with the environment. Tangibility introduces aspects of playfulness in the interaction which increases the importance of social interaction. Several studies indicate that tangible interaction can enhance creativity, communication and collaboration between people. Africano et al. (2004), Ryokai et al. (2004) and Zuckerman et al. (2005) have tested tangible interaction concepts in the learning environment with children using hi-fidelity prototypes. All of the studies report that the tangible interfaces promoted collaboration and communication, the children

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were engaged in the interaction and considered it fun. Hornecker & Buur (2006) show examples of three case studies of tangible interfaces where the same applies to adults.

When tangible interfaces clearly enhance the social aspects of interaction, virtual and augmented reality tend to serve more solitary experiences since the environment is generally viewed through a personal device such as goggles or a hand-held display device. These technologies have potential to change people’s perception and experiential relationship with the environment significantly by getting them immersed in the interaction. Immersive experiences are most often related to game-play (e.g. Jennett et. al 2008) but virtual environments and augmented reality technologies can provide experiences of immersion of different degrees also in other contexts. Hornecker (2010) has compared experiences with two different kinds of exhibition installations in museum environment. One installation consisted of a multi-touch interactive table and the other installation provided an augmented reality view on the museum environment with a telescope device. The ethnographic study indicated that while the telescope installation provided a more immersive experience the multi-touch table enabled more social and shared experiences.

Studying user experience of smart environments is still challenging today because such environments do not yet exist and setting them up is laborious and often impossible. Experimental smart environments have normally been built in closed spaces such as laboratories, homes and museums where the technical arrangements are manageable and affordable, and where there are fewer stakeholders involved. For the same reasons long-term user studies are also rare even though they would provide useful information about actually living in the new smart environments. Koskela & Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila (2004) have conducted a long-term experiment of living in a smart home. They recruited a young couple to live in a smart home for six months. The study shows that adapting new technologies and new ways of interaction is a slow process and that even six months was not enough for the inhabitants to achieve full trust on the intelligent system. The study also gave useful information about the preferred ways of interaction in a smart home. Here mobility, availability and accessibility were decisive factors, and the preferred interaction device was a mobile phone.

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2.2.4 Designing for user experience

The previous sections illustrate how complex use experience is as a phenomenon. Consequently, designing products, systems, services and environments which create good user experiences is challenging. It is widely agreed in the field of UX research and design that it is not possible to design any specific experiences because the product is not alone responsible of the resulting experience. Instead it is possible to design for user experience (Wright et al. 2004 and Law et al. 2009). This means that the designer can intend to create a context which would result in a wanted experience rather than the experience itself (Forlizzi & Ford 2000 and Hassenzahl & Tractinsky 2006). Roto (2006) suggests that it might be reasonable to design for good user experiences in general instead of anything more particular. Many of the UX models can be used for understanding what different aspects must be taken into account when designing. The challenge remains to find out how these different aspects affect the experience in each particular design case.

Different methods are used for getting information about the experience in different phases of product development. It is important to gather information in all stages of the design process from the beginning to the end. User driven design processes start commonly by identifying users’ needs and expectations. There are several methods for getting information about the needs and I will discuss them in more detail in the next chapter since the user study done for this thesis concerns identifying user needs. When the design process has advanced to the level of mock-ups or prototypes, or when the research is focusing on existing products, user experiences can be evaluated. User tests are often conducted at laboratories but in that case the research concentrates more on usability issues. To get understanding about experiences which are highly affected by the context of use, it is more useful to make field studies in real contexts of use. Also, considering the effects of time on user experience it is fruitful to make long-term studies about product use which gives information about the incorporation of products in the users’ lives.

The UX models often emphasise the experience in the moment of interaction. It is important to get information about the user’s immediate feelings in the actual usage situation, and this is also challenging because these feelings are often difficult or impossible to formalise. Experience sampling methods have been developed in order to get immediate feedback from users in real situations (Hole & Williams 2007). Even here the situation of gathering that information still affects the experience and different methods for measuring the user’s physiological reactions automatically have been developed to identify immediate feelings (Mahlke et al. 2006). However, if designers base their conception of user experience only

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on the moment of interaction they separate the interaction from other aspects related to the product which have their effect on the experience. Memories and product meanings are important for the user when they are making decisions about purchasing a product. In such moments the user cannot always interact with the product but s/he must rely on his/her other knowledge about the product and his/her recollections which are interpretations about possible previous interactions with the product.

Finally, I will discuss some practical considerations about designing for UX in smart environments. The difficulty in designing for UX in smart environments is the fact that they do not exist yet and therefore it is hard or impossible to get empirical information about the experience. Therefore, the design of smart environments must rely on studying users’ needs and expectations which can give hints about the actual experience in the future. Roto (2007) defines the concept of expected user experience which arises from the other knowledge about the product, such as the brand image, other people’s opinions and earlier experiences. In the case of smart environments the knowledge people have about them is mostly created by media and arts, such as literature and films, since there are no companies which would create such environments.

Some design issues have already been found in experimental studies on interaction and UX in smart environments. The problem of the “invisible” computer was already handled in the section about UX in smart environments. This means that an “interface” should be designed for the environment. Traditionally interfaces have been designed only for products but in the case of an environment the interface should be a spatial construction. On the whole, the interface would consist of two parts: the interface for the entire environment and the interface for the single products in it. The invisibility of the technology also leads to the need for designing affordances which are cues for interaction.

Another purpose for a spatial interface which will come of interest when the smart environments have developed to be complex ecosystems of numerous services, applications and products, is to create a coherent user experience of a unified system. Bowers et al. (2007) have studied how coherence of experience is formed in a technology enhanced museum environment consisting of multiple smart devices. Based on the research results they created principles for assembling multi-device environments. These principles emphasise the importance of similar interaction methods and activities across the different devices for creating a coherent experience of a larger intelligent system. They also suggested a portable device to be used for enhancing the coherence between different spaces.

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3 METHODS

3.1 Introduction

Identifying user needs in early concept creation phase is challenging for several reasons. First of all, when there is no detailed concept yet it is not possible to make a prototype or a mock-up for testing users’ reactions to it and the users cannot evaluate how useful the concept would be based on their experience of the real or simulated use. It is very difficult for users to recognise needs for something they do not have experience of. At the initial stages of concept development the users should express their needs in relation to the concept which still exists as only a very general idea even in the minds of the researchers or designers.

Secondly, in some cases the need for a product in development might even be dependent on some conditions that are only anticipated to exist in the future in which case the users should not only be able to understand their needs but more specifically to understand their needs in an imagined future context because the concept in question can be relevant only there. This is the case with the Space Browser concept. The need for such a browser is only expected to emerge when smart environments will reach a level of complexity where any single place inhabits a large amount of digital services and different interaction possibilities.

Besides the most common methods in early concept creation phase, focus groups, interviews and questionnaires, there are other methods that have been developed for getting information about needs, experiences and behaviours that are difficult for the users to formalise. Ethnographic methods include observing users’ activities in their own environment (Hyysalo 2009, pp. 106 – 124). Here the interpretation of the users’ behaviours remains with the observer who can notice things in the activities that the users might not be able to recognise. Probing is an alternative when observations cannot be made. Design

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probes have been developed to involve the users in the design process to provide self-documented information about their personal lives, experiences and ideas to be used in the design practice. This method fits has potential in exploring new opportunities and enabling users to generate more creative ideas than with the more traditional methods. (Mattelmäki 2006.)

Empathising methods such as bodystorming or placestorming concentrate on imagining and experiencing use through engaging in the action. There are several ways to use these methods. On the one hand, the designers can empathise users to understand them or the users can act out situations of use in order to get a more realistic conception of them and to generate ideas. Furthermore, professional actors can be used in order to benefit from their empathising and improvisation skills. On the other hand, these methods can be used in different settings from laboratory to the real context of use. Oulasvirta et al. (2002) have compared the use of bodystorming in different environments and found out that it is beneficial to use it in real contexts, especially when the activities studied are not familiar to the participants. We tried the bodystorming method with three improvisation actors in one session in a seminar at VTT but it turned out to not to work. The reason was inexperience in using the method which resulted in the session becoming entertaining theatre rather than a method for generating new ideas. An interview was conducted with the actors afterwards and they provided useful feedback for development in the use of the method.

Despite the benefits that these methods have for identifying users’ needs I decided to use the focus group method and another light method which I call “idea cards” for my study. The main reason for the choice was the restrictions in time and resources. Focus group is cost-effective and time-saving method which can still provide useful information if done properly. Furthermore, the study covered different kinds of environments where the Space Browser concept would be applied and for example the home environment would have been difficult to access. Probe study could have been applied in all environments but it is very demanding to the users and it would have been difficult to recruit uses for it because there are no immediate benefits for the users in this study. Probes fit best in projects which are developing solutions for a user group with particular needs that the users identify themselves and see personal benefits in participating in the study. Next, I will describe the methods I used individually.

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3.2 Focus groups

Three focus group sessions were conducted with 11 participants in total (7 males, 4 females). Each of the groups concentrated on different types of environment: home (private environment), office (semi-public) and public.

In the beginning of the session the participants were shown an introductory presentation about smart environments. I had created the animated presentation on PowerPoint and it explained briefly what smart environments are and what kind of interaction possibilities they offer. This tool was a form of scenario and its purpose was to ensure that the participants who were not necessarily familiar with ICT technologies would get a common understanding about the subject. The presentation included all of the three environments, and by showing through examples some possibilities the new technologies offer the participants were encouraged to be imaginative in creating ideas for new kinds of digital services which was the next phase of the session.

Figure 8. Screen shots from the smart environment animation: home, office and public contexts.

The participants were asked to create ideas for possible smart services and applications. Each group concentrated on one of the three types of environment. The ideas were written on Post-It notes and after the participants did not create anymore ideas they were gathered and each idea was discussed in the group. After discussing about the ideas for possible smart services the discussion continued with topics related more closely to the interaction in smart environments and more general topics such as the participants’ attitudes towards smart environments. The idea creation phase further helped the participants in the discussion by providing an example collection of services which could form a smart environment.

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Figure 9. Participants’ ideas on Post-Its. The different colours belonged to different groups.

3.3 “Idea cards”

The “idea cards” was a method for gathering ideas from colleagues at VTT. These were postcards to be sent to Father Christmas as the ideas were gathered around Christmas time. The cards had prewritten “Dear Father Christmas, I wish for a following smart service:” and “I need this service because:”. I gathered the ideas with the cards in several occasions. Most of the ideas were produced in two seminars where I first showed the same presentation of smart environments that I showed in the focus groups and then handed out the cards for the audience to fill. In addition to that I left the cards for a few days in two lounges at VTT where the employees go for coffee breaks. Alongside the cards I had a box to drop them in and a sheet of paper to explain briefly the purpose of the cards. There was, however, no presentation about smart environments as in the seminars. From one lounge I got no answers and from the other only three. The purpose of the idea cards was to identify users’ needs similarly as the idea generation session in the focus groups. Here, however, the participants were not able to discuss the ideas further as was done in the focus groups, and I had to rely on the written reasons the respondents had given in order to clarify the needs. Furthermore, the cards did not have any restrictions in regards of the type of environment the services would be intended to belong.

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Figure 10. Idea cards filled by VTT employees.

3.4 Analysis of the material

I used a data-driven analysis for identifying the needs and expectations from the participants’ responses. The service ideas from both the focus groups and the “idea cards” provided as material for need finding. I coded the material iteratively by regrouping and reorganising the categories and compared them to other categorisations of needs found in the literature. For the identification of the expectations for interaction I used the focus group discussions and conducted a similar kind of coding although I did not need to iterate as much because the expectations were more explicitly expressed by the participants.

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4. RESULTS

4.1 Users’ needs

Participants were asked to create as many ideas as possible in the manner of brainstorming, without criticism. However, all of the participants clearly tried to come up with ideas that they saw useful or desirable, often fulfilling some need they felt they had. There were no “crazy” ideas, which is not surprising considering the fact that the participants did not know each other and probably did not want to risk appearing foolish to others. On the other hand, the purpose of the brainstorming was not primarily to discover novel ideas in which case we would have had to encourage the creative thinking of the participants with some additional exercises. The purpose of this exercise was to gather needs that could be identified through the analysis of the users’ ideas. The total number of ideas was 48 from the focus groups and 27 from the idea cards. Some of the ideas are similar with each other but created by different participants. The more there are ideas of a similar type, the more general the related need can be expected to be. Many of the ideas featured elements of smart environments such as ubiquitous computing, automation and proactivity which shows that the participants had a sufficient understanding of the concept of smart environment.

After the first round of analysis I had identified 13 different needs which were feeling of being in control, orderliness / organisation, independent living, comfort / reduced effort, efficacy, security, communication, getting information, leisure time / reducing work, physical well-being, financial well-being, enjoyment / fun and self-esteem. I compared these with a list of ten fundamental psychological needs that Sheldon and colleagues (2001) had compiled from prominent psychological theories and evaluated by three quantitative studies with students. These ten needs are autonomy, relatedness, competence, self-esteem, security, self-actualization-meaning, physical thriving, popularity-influence and money-luxury. Even though these needs are of a more fundamental and abstract nature than the needs that I identified, there are similarities between them and they can be seen to have a hierarchical

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relationship with each other. To get to the most basic needs I should have used additional methods such as laddering but for identifying user requirements for interaction in smart environments it is more useful to stay in a more concrete level.

After the comparison and further analysis I joined some similar needs and refined my list to contain 9 needs which are efficacy, control, independence, knowledge, pleasure / fun, security, physical well-being, communication and financial well-being. I discarded self-esteem because, as Hassenzahl et al. (2010) argue, it can be seen as the outcome of the fulfilment of the other needs rather than a need in itself. Next, I will handle each of the needs separately and present the results from the focus groups and the idea cards under those needs. See the appendixes 1 and 2 for the division of the ideas between environments and needs.

EfficacyThe purpose of many technologies is to make our everyday lives easier by either freeing people from doing some tasks or reducing the effort that has to be put in them. Reduced effort enables increased efficiency but does not need to result in it. However, they are closely related to each other and I have included both of the needs under this category. The effort can be either mental or physical, and the solution can be making the task more simple or enabling for example a quicker way to accomplish the task. Reducing effort also refers to services that do some work on behalf of the user and this way increase his/her leisure time.

64 out of 75 service ideas answered to this need directly and 4 secondarily or with a weaker importance, which means that it is a very common need that the users have towards technological solutions. Participants expressed the need to reduce effort much more often than the need to increase productivity. A typical service idea for reducing effort is a system that follows the public transport in real-time and gives estimates about arrival times on the bus stop (FG “Home”, FG “Public” and CARDS). Services that aimed primarily at efficacy rather than to reduce effort were for example a touch-screen table in the office environment that enables simultaneous handling of different documents by different people (FG “Office”) or a bathroom mirror that turns non-reflective when it is the time to stop making up and leave (CARDS). Efficacy does not only apply to users but also to the systems. An example of a smart services whose purpose is to increase efficiency is a system that allows devices with batteries to release power back to the network automatically if needed to optimise the power distribution (FG “Home”). Many of the services described autonomous intelligent systems that were able to make decisions based on observation of the user or other information either from the environment or digital sources.

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ControlControl refers to the need to have control over oneself and one’s life, and over the technologies one is using. Having control means that the person is able to make decisions about the object of control. Orderliness and organisation are lower-level needs that are a way of satisfying the higher-level need for control.

As the second important need control was identified in 37 of 75 ideas as a strong need and in 11 as a weak need. Many of the control-related service ideas were systems that through intelligence and automation enable users to have control over their lives such as a refrigerator that recognises the food inside and suggests recipes utilising the ingredients in the fridge, giving priority to the ones that will be the first to go bad (FG “Home”). However, in the discussions the focus group participants stressed the importance of having control over the intelligent systems. The lower-level needs for orderliness and organisation manifested in the service ideas as solutions for cleaning such as self-cleaning windows (FG “Home”) and as services that enable the users to be more organised such as an intelligent work-shift list (FG “Office”).

IndependenceThis need refers to independent living and it is closely related to reducing effort and having control over one’s life. Here independence is understood as the ability to get along without other people’s help. This becomes relevant mostly with disabled and elderly people who can benefit from technologies enabling them to be autonomous.

The focus group participants were not disabled themselves and did not create ideas from that perspective primarily. I gathered here ideas that were meant to ease the users’ lives but that could also benefit disabled or elderly people. Doors and lights that react automatically to the user’s moves (FG “Home”) and voice and gesture interaction with electronics (FGs “Home” and “Office”) are typical examples of services that reduce effort for any user but that can especially benefit disabled or elderly people. 28 out of 75 ideas had a strong connection with the need for independence and 5 had a weak or secondary connection.

There was some discussion among the participants about solutions for assisted living. One participant had been working in an assisted living facility for disabled and she saw great potentials in intelligent services supporting these people’s lives. Also participants who were sceptical towards smart services were favourable towards the possibilities they offer for disabled and elderly. The ideas where the purpose of the technology was clearly to assist the user with an experienced deficiency were almost uniquely related to memory

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aids. There were surprisingly many (8) ideas that were for that purpose such as flower pots that remind the user of the need to water (FG “Home”) and only two ideas that were related to other experienced deficiencies which were lack of the sense of time and direction.

KnowledgeHere knowledge is seen as a need to get information. The information can consist of simple data such as the opening hours of the swimming pool or free seats at the film theatre (FG “Public”) or it can be more complex like in the case of an interactive touch screen table that can be used for reading the digital newspaper (FG “Home”). There were 23 ideas out of 75 that supported knowledge acquisition primarily and 5 ideas where knowledge acquisition was a secondary need or one among other needs. Often the need for getting information was related to mobile or otherwise changing context which indicates a need for dynamic and context-aware systems in getting information. Many of the services that the participants talked about in all focus groups provided information from distant sources through network technologies and by various kinds of devices. This indicates that the participants see connectivity to information as an important benefit of smart devices and services.

Pleasure / funThis category describes needs for stimulation and enjoyment. Pleasure is to be understood as pleasant experiences and feeling of comfort when fun relates to joyfulness and positive excitement. Services that cater to these needs belong mostly to the area of entertainment but I have included here all services that enhance comfort. 22 ideas out of 75 answered to the need for pleasure and fun directly and 5 indirectly. Very few of them contained elements of actual fun. One of these was a Monopoly 2.0 game which would be projected to the environment and would enable also remote participation (CARDS). Most of the ideas were meant to increase comfort or create pleasant sensory experiences such as a toilet air freshener that automatically reacts to smell (FG “Home”), a noise cancellation system for blocking background noises at an open office (FG “Office”) or a bedroom that wakes up gently so that the mood is good and it is not cold outside the bed (CARDS). Aesthetics belong also to the category of pleasure and fun. The only service idea related to aesthetics was an interior decoration service for the office which enables changing the environment according to personal preferences, utilising intelligent materials such as wallpapers that can change appearance (FG “Office”).

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SecuritySecurity is one of the basic human needs which is a necessity for a stable and good life. It relates to control in a way that security enables the individual’s control over his/her body and possessions. The feeling of security or the lack of it does not always correspond to the actual conditions. People may feel insecure without a reason or secure when they are in danger. There were 13 ideas out of 75 where security was found as a strong need and 5 ideas with a weaker need. The participants came up with service ideas providing various kinds of security. A “safety sector” that provides security in the environment in the case of a dangerous situation (for example violence or robbery) (FG “Public”) is for promoting personal physical integrity, a system for immediately reporting dangerous spots on bicycle lanes that need to be repaired (FG “Public”) is for increasing safety of all cyclists and a tag that can be attached to all valuable personal items which enables following their location (CARDS) is for securing possessions.

Physical well-beingPhysical well-being is a need to maintain a healthy body. This includes all habits that affect well-being such as physical activities, diet, medication, sleep, stress level, (long-term) sensory stimulation etc. This partly overlaps with the need for pleasure but is more related to health which distinguishes it as a separate need. 12 ideas out of 75 were based on the need for this need primarily and 8 secondarily. Examples of these ideas are a system that follows the user’s state of health by observing his/her temperature, voice and probably even behaviour (FG “Home”) and adjusting the room temperature according to physiological signals (FG “Home”) The relatively large amount of secondary needs result from the fact that many services enable healthy living but do not necessarily lead to it as in the case of a service that automatically generates a grocery shopping list for a week at a time (FG “Home”) or the impact is very little as in the case of a service that turns the coffee maker on at the same time the alarm clock goes off (FG “Home”) which enables a comfortable and refreshing wake-up but does not make a great impact on physical well-being.

CommunicationCommunication is a need for social relationships and as such a basic human need. Being so important, it is surprising to see that very few ideas were related to communication. The need for knowledge is closely related to communication but is here understood as its counterpart as knowledge means a need to receive information and communication means a need to contact other people and communicate to their direction. Only 9 out of

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75 ideas had a strong connection and 4 had a weak connection to this need. Examples of ideas related to communication are a tele-conference system that includes intelligent devices such as screen tables and enables communication and collaboration between distant locations (FG “Office”) and a car pooling service enabled with mobile technology (CARDS).

Financial well-beingFinancial well-being provides security so these needs are related to each other in a way that security is a higher-level need for financial well-being. However, I did not combine these needs because also other needs affect in the background of the desire for wealth. Especially, when a sufficient level of wealth is achieved security is no more the determining motive but the need to increase wealth may continue for other reasons such as the desire for social status or luxury. The service ideas supported financial well-being by saving money such as an intelligent refrigerator that follows the freshness of the food inside and suggests recipes that according to that to minimise the amount of food being wasted (FG “Home”) or adjustment of room temperature according to physiological signals (FG “Home”). This aspect is related to the need for efficacy which can be seen as a lower-level need since improving efficacy supports financial well-being. There were 9 out of 75 ideas related to financial well-being directly and 1 indirectly.

4.2 User expectations for interaction in smart environments

The first part of the results dealt with participants’ needs towards the services and applications in smart environments derived from the ideas they created. The second part of the results presents the focus group participants’ expectations for interaction with the smart environments. These results relate more closely to the Space Browser concept and give directions for designing its interface. The name Space Browser was not mentioned in the focus groups on order to avoid confusing the participants. Instead other expressions were used but I will here refer to the Space Browser whenever the subject fits the concept.

The brainstorming session and discussion of the generated ideas provided the basis for the participants to imagine an actual smart environment and interaction with it. The discussion concentrated on the concept of Space Browser in order to get practical information for the early concept development but gave insight also into issues of interaction in smart environments in general. Next, I will present the results under topics that were identified in the discussion. I will include the comparison of different environments under the topic if some differences were found.

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DevicesWhen asked how the smart services should be presented in the environment the participants favoured mobile phones but mentioned also fixed screens as an interface device. The use of mobile phone was considered natural since most of the people are so used to it and use them for many purposes other than phoning. In the public environment the primary interface device was also mobile phone. Also a possibility of other mobile devices such as a wrist watch was mentioned as an alternative to mobile phone. In addition to mobile devices the participants also suggested fixed displays in the public environment such as on the backrests of bus seats. In the office environment only a centralised display solution was proposed. In the home environment the participants also suggested a distribution of the interface between different devices, expecting that the system should be accessible with any device. A TV was mentioned as one possible device since it has a relatively large screen. One of the participants had a more futuristic idea of getting rid of all display devices by using augmented reality with contact lenses. Interaction would happen with gestures in the augmented view.

AffordancesBesides the devices, discussing the ways that the information in smart environments should be displayed to the users deals with affordances in the environment. One participant in the “Public” group suggested that the services would come to the knowledge of users by the way they are built in the environment. Other participants did not come up with the idea of the environment and the smart objects themselves giving the information. However, all of them accepted the idea of having symbols such as logos on all smart objects in the environment when the idea was presented to them by the facilitators.

AccessibilityAs already mentioned in relation to devices, the participants wanted the information about smart services to be accessible with any devices and from anywhere. Different devices like large screens, mobile phones and ubiquitous computing devices should all have access to the same application and the user could choose the device that is the most appropriate depending on the situation. The principle is that any device that is capable of displaying and receiving information has access to the application. Accessibility refers also to some other needs that I will discuss later, such as easiness of use and naturalness of interaction. These qualities make the services more accessible to the users when in this paragraph accessibility is referred to the devices accessing the information.

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ReliabilityIt was considered highly important that the technologies enabling the smart services should be as error free as possible. The participants were concerned about the risks related to the increasing dependence on technology.

“When the computer breaks then nothing works”,

said one participant in the “Home” group. The participants did not trust technologies and it was emphasised that there should always be backup systems available and that the option for manual use should be maintained always when possible. A participant in the “Office” group described that

“A building with only a lift and no stairs would be scary.”

The fact that devices do not last long and that many applications are put into market too early when they are not quite ready yet was discussed as compromising reliability.

MinimalismMinimalism is related to incorporating the Space Browser interface to existing devices. The participants did not want another device for just accessing the digital services. I described the participants’ preferences on the devices earlier under the title “Devices”. Minimalism in the interaction is related to subtleness of the way the system is communicating to the user. When the browser is working autonomously and prompting the user it should happen as subtly as possible especially when it is offering some information to the user. This was discussed particularly in relation to audio alerts. Participants preferred subtle beeping or clicking sounds to a human voice talking to them. I will discuss the use of different modalities in more detail later under the title “Natural interaction”.

Ease of useThe requirement that all participants expectedly stressed the most was ease of use. It is an experiential quality which is related to usability and is a general requirement for the use of any system. Smart services should be so easy to use that everybody would be able to use them without any technical experience. This is important especially in the case of public environments which are shared by all kinds of people – users and non-users alike. It was agreed that the system should not require much learning or technical abilities from the users. The participants were not willing to invest a lot of time and mental effort in learning

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to use the systems. Participants in the “Home” focus group discussed undesirable smart environments in terms of ease of use:

“Life turns into coding, measuring and learning to use the things.”

“Yes, then everyday life becomes like a feat of engineering work. Like, I survived another day at

home!”

One participant said that the technology should itself guide users during the interaction. This could happen with lights and other signals (FG “Office”). The ease of use was related also to reducing effort in doing different tasks. This is one goal of smart services in general as I discussed earlier under the user needs. The next topics – simplicity, natural interaction and adaptability – are qualities of the system that contribute to the ease of use.

SimplicityThis quality is related to both the Space Browser and smart environments in general. The oversupply of information was considered as disturbing already today, and with the introduction of digital services and smart devices to the environment there is a danger of creating digital divide.

“The youth today has learned to live in this kind of environment. People of my age, however, are

beginning to be quite lost.” (male, 65 years, FG “Office”)

The Space Browser has potential of simplifying the interaction in the smart environment by becoming the interface for it but this is possible only by incorporating it in the implementation of the technological solutions. The idea of replacing all display devices by augmented reality contact lenses (FG “Home”) supports the idea of simplifying the smart environment ecosystem and enabling a unified interface for it. The smart services should also not make the interaction more complicated when they are offering new possibilities. One participant gave an example of a smart lighting system that enables setting times for the lights and said that in the end it is so much easier to just use the light switch on the wall (FG “Home”). Such kinds of smart services risk having no added value with the possibilities they offer.

Natural interactionNaturalness of interaction was an important quality in smart environments for the participants. Besides being a quality contributing to ease of use it relates to reducing effort. This is important especially for elderly and disabled. One participant mentioned that smart environments could enable interaction for some disabled people who are only able for example to blow (FG “Office”). The examples of natural interaction that came out in the discussions were mostly related to multimodality. The participants suggested speech

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interfaces in all environments and regarded them as positive. In the “Public” focus group the participants specified that the speech commands would be done to a mobile phone in which case the user would not appear awkward when talking alone. In the home and office environments this did not come up. Instead the participants only mentioned speech interaction with devices, which presumably means talking directly to them.

Gesture interaction was also mentioned in home and office environments. The participant in the “Home” group who suggested the augmented reality interface on contact lenses described that the interaction with it would happen with gestures in the air:

“For example a red dot appears above the coffee maker and when the user points a finger at it, it

opens a semicircle where the user could choose for example an “espresso” and “double milk”, then

“boil”. So it would be making gestures in the air.” (FG “Home”).

Visual feedback was clearly the most popular of the modalities when considering feedback. The participants in the “Public” group discussed the environment or devices giving auditive information and feedback, when asked about it as a possible modality. They agreed that the auditive feedback should always be only optional since it can be disturbing to others in the same space. Especially speech feedback was considered undesirable. The participants considered talking devices as too disturbing and preferred other, more subtle sounds such as text message sounds.

Naturalness of interaction does not necessarily refer only to novel interaction methods such as multimodality. One participant pointed out that the interaction methods that the users are familiar with have become natural to them. He said that in the adoption of new systems the interface has a decisive role, that people will adopt things that they are used to. People, at least young users, are already very used to mobile phone as a device for various purposes other than calling. The same participant described that

“using mobile phone as a device is very natural.”

Another participant brought out the question about the logic of interactive systems in relation to naturalness. He noted that the systems might behave perfectly according to their own logic but if that logic differs from human logic their use is not natura (FG “Office”).

AdaptabilityAdaptability is a quality of the system which enables better control. Control is an important need related to smart environments as I described earlier under users’ needs. The participants wanted the smart environments to adapt to needs of different users and different situations of usage. The adaptability refers both to the intelligence of the systems

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and the ability of the users to modify the systems. The participants in the “Office” and “Public” groups discussed that the users should be able to define the level on which the information about the smart services would be presented to them according to their needs. The level of complexity of the interface and service offering should be modifiable according to the competence of the user: inexperienced users would get only the basic services that satisfy their needs and advanced users could get more options which demand deeper understanding of the technologies.

The adaptability of the system also refers to adjusting the level of proactivity with which the system is communicating to the user. The user should be able to choose the way of receiving information through the system according to their information needs in the current situation. The participants in the “Public” group suggested that the user could choose the mode according to which the system would either offer information actively or only by the user’s request. The participants thought that in some situations they might want to let the system prompt them automatically but in general they wanted to keep the initiative on the user’s side. They presumed that in a familiar environment it would be annoying and unnecessary to receive automatic information about existing services but in a new environment it might be useful. It should also be possible to define the topics from which to get automatic information. In the inactive mode the user would get the information by using a search function.

Furthermore, adaptability relates to modifying the privacy settings of the system. This aspect was important for the participants for security reasons. They saw benefits in the environment being able to recognise the users because it would enable fluent and implicit interaction but on the other hand they perceived many threats in automatic gathering of information about people. They were concerned about how the information would be used and who would have access to it, and they also pointed out the possibilities of using the data for harmful and illegal purposes. Therefore, the participants expected that the privacy settings should be adjustable and that the user should always be informed when his/her information is gathered.

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4.3 Comparing home, office and public environments

In this chapter I will compare the results between the different focus groups and idea cards to identify differences between different kinds of environments.

Some differences in user needs could be identified between the different environments. The type of environment determined what kind of services and interaction were important for the participants. The needs that varied the most between the environments were independence, knowledge, security and communication.

Independence was found in all other groups except the “Public” group where only two ideas were remotely related to independence, mainly through the fact that they provide safety and as a result of it the user can be considered to be more independent. In the “Home” group independence was instead the third important need. There many of the service ideas were directly suitable for assisted living in the case of elderly and disabled people.

Knowledge was lacking as a need in the “Office” group, whereas it was the second important need in the “Public” group. Office as an environment is fairly stable and so there is not much need to get information that is directly related to the environment, and on the other hand getting information is one of the main purposes of the office and well incorporated in the activities there as people mostly sit in front of computers where their information needs are already well satisfied. This may be the reason why the participants in the “Office” group did not come up with ideas for knowledge. In the public environment the situation is different as people often have the role of consumer which makes it essential to get information about services. There the users also do not have easy access to information as they are mobile. The public environment is also more dynamic than home or office since the information is changing much more. Even in the home environment most of the services for getting information were related to events in the public environment such as information about public transport.

Another need that is important in public environments is security. At “Home” and “Office” groups this need had low importance. This is not surprising since the home and office environments are generally considered safe from outside threats because they are closed spaces. In the public environment it is common to feel insecure, especially because of the threat of violence. The security need in the home environment was mostly related to protecting possessions and sometimes to prevent accidents.

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Finally, communication was more important in the “Office” group than in other groups. This partly compensates the lack of the need for knowledge in the office environment as communication is about knowledge transfer and unlike getting access to information, communication is most often considered to be defective in the office community. The need to improve communication is also related to increased dispersion of the work in different locations and a need to cooperate across distances. The fact that communication was of a low importance in the other environments is, however, surprising. There are many studies done related to communication between family members in the home environment (e.g. Markopoulos 2005, van der Hoog 2004 and Haines et al. 2005).

When the work environment is compared with the public environment this can be understandable because in a workplace the community is limited and social relationships are more or less stable whereas in the public environment people share the space with strangers with whom they do not have a need to communicate. In the home environment the social relationships are also stable and communication is important which we would have expected to show also in the users’ responses. One reason for this may be that the home environment already supports communication since the family members are easily able to have direct communication with each other in the shared space. Another reason might be that the majority of the participants in the home group were young students and the way they talked about their needs and service ideas for the home indicates that they live alone. As the participants in all groups discussed their needs from a very personal basis it is clear that their situations in life have affected the way they perceive their needs. Had we asked the needs from people who have families, the responses might have been different.

Besides the needs that varied the most in different environments, other differences between the environments were identified. These relate to ease of learning, the presentation of the services and their state in the browser interface, and automation and proactivity of the system.

The home is an environment which is the most familiar to people. It is also an environment where they have the most control over what services, appliances and social relationships they have. People have a personal, long-lasting relationship with their home and possibilities to modify it to serve their individual needs. In the home environment people are normally using the devices regularly and during a long period of time which means that the easy adoption of a device or a service is not as crucial as in public environment. For example an interestingly shaped water tap may not give obvious cues on how it is used, which is

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not desirable in public toilets where it is important that users can easily understand its functions the first time they see it. However, at home such a tap may be just as easy to use as any other tap after it is learned when it has been first tried. The inhabitants can then choose such devices on criteria that stress for example aesthetic aspects over the easiness to learn. In the office environment the ease of learning is more important than at home since it is related to the need for efficiency but compared with public environment some amount of learning can be reasonable in the work context if it results in increasing efficiency once the use is learned. Therefore, the ease of learning remains the most important need in the public environment.

In the home environment group it became clear that the need to present what services the environment offers was much less important than in other environments. The participants agreed that the inhabitants normally know what services they have acquired for their homes and there is no need that the environment would tell it to them. In contrast, in the public environment the need to know what is available was essential, as people do not decide on the offering themselves and often go to places that they are not familiar with. On the other hand, the need to know the state of the services was important in the home and office environments. This is because in those environments the users manipulate the services in a way that it changes their state. An example of such a service is an electric lock on the front door that can be programmed to lock the door at a desired time each day (FG “Home”). In the public environment people do not have much control over the environment and therefore the services offered in such contexts normally do not relate to the modification of the environment but rather to acquiring information from it. It was also important for the participants to know the state of the services in the public environment but it was mainly related to whether the service that provides information about the environment is on or off, or in an automatic or manual mode.

Automation and proactivity of the services were also received differently among the different groups. At home and office environments many of the services suggested by the participants were working autonomously, observed the users and made decisions based on that information. In the public environment proactivity was not as welcomed because it was mostly associated with aggressive advertising and mobile context in which case the information offered by the services changes a lot as people move from one location to another. Acceptance of observation of the user is a result of a negotiation between loss of privacy and received benefits. In the home environment people have acquired the services themselves for some particular need. They clearly benefit from them and consider it worthwhile to let the system observe them and make autonomous decisions on their

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behalf. In the public environment it is not self-evident that the information gathered from people is used for their benefit only. It is also more likely that the information does not serve the users’ individual needs and due to this the participants in the public group expressed the strongest need for the user’s control over the services.

The idea cards did not give any restrictions about the type of environment so they gathered ideas from all of the environments. When the respondents did not have to consider the environment, many of the service ideas were not environment-specific. 9 out of 27 ideas could be applied in any environment. The nature of these services was either mobile such as a memory prosthesis that would remind me of the things I have promised, shows what has happened before and explains me the things I do not understand (CARDS) or related to devices that can exist in many types of environments such as sharing of digital information easily and wirelessly from mobile to other devices such as TVs, computers or car radios (CARDS). To clarify, however, the majority of the ideas created in the focus groups could also be applied in many different environments if it was not taken into account that the participants created them for the specific environment.

Other ideas in the idea cards were related to specific environments. The clear majority, 10 out of 29 ideas, were related to home environment. Public environment received 5 ideas and office environment only 3 even though the cards were filled in the office. The results correspond to the focus groups where the “Home” group alone generated more ideas than the “Office” and “Public” groups together. Also the need profile of the card ideas was closest to the profile of the “Home” group with the three most prominent needs being efficacy, control and independence in the same order.

The ideas covered a large variety of activities. Most of the activities in the home and office environments were routine activities that occur either daily or weekly. In the home these were related to various chores such as activities related to food, cleaning or management of the environment and devices in it. Tolmie et al. (2002) have studied domestic life and activities at home, and their findings support these results as they found routines to be an essential part of life in the home environment. In the office environment the activities were related to various work tasks. In the public environment the activities were of a more singular nature as they often related to unexpected threatening situations or receiving information about services as the need occurs. This indicates that the participants considered smart services to help managing the unpredictability of events in the public environments and the predetermined, repetitive activities in the home and office environments.

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4.4 Discussion of the results

In general the participants wanted smart environments to make their lives easier and more comfortable, and to enable their existing daily tasks to be done more effectively and with less effort. It is also the main principle included in many definitions of smart environments (e.g. Das & Cook 2006). The most important needs were efficacy, control and independence. The needs that had the least significance to the participants were physical well-being, communication and financial well-being.

This means that the needs that the participants expressed in the focus groups and idea cards were mostly of pragmatic nature. There were very few needs identifiable relating to hedonic aspects. There were only two ideas that were purely related to entertainment. Both of the ideas were game applications (FG “Home” and CARDS). Other services relating to entertainment included getting real-time mobile information about showtimes and free seats at cinemas (FG “Public”), technologies for better quality wireless transmission of audiovisual material for a more immersive experience and faster and easier sharing of digital material such as images or videos from one device to another (CARDS). The “Public” focus group had the least service ideas related to pleasure or fun. When asked about the relevance of entertainment applications in the smart public environment the participants rated them of a secondary importance.

Some of the ideas were based on needs to improve some personal abilities which were experienced to be insufficient. These were problems with memory or organisation, bad sense of direction or time and difficulties in waking up. Mostly the ideas were based on desires rather than needs and related to opportunities that the technologies offer rather than necessities. This is natural because the participants were invited in the focus groups to discuss the development of smart environments in general and therefore they were not prepared to approach the subject from the perspective of some particular needs they might have. The setting was slightly different in the idea cards where people were asked to fill in a smart service they felt that they needed and also give a reason for the need.

The expectations the participants had for interaction in smart environments related mainly to ease of use. The preferred device for interaction, when it comes to the Space Browser concept, was mobile phone. Also many of the service ideas were applications for mobile phone but still the majority of them included other devices when mobile phones

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were involved only in 18 out of 48 ideas. Since the Space Browser would be used in any environments and different situations by different kinds of people the participants expected it to be highly modifiable in terms of the complexity of its operations, the information it offers and the level of privacy in handing over information about the user.

People’s role differs considerably in private, semi-public and public environments and it affects the needs people have in them. The differing elements between these types of environment are how familiar the environment is to the person, how much the person has control over the devices, services, other facilities and activities in the environment, what kind of social relationships the person has in the environment and what kind of activities the person is doing in the environment. The differences were most prominent between the home and public environments. The office as a semi-public environment has elements of them both. It has similarities with the home environment in that the employees have some control over their environment and the services enable making changes to the space. The similarity with the public environment is that the user has little possibility to decide on what services are available in the environment.

The participants in the “Home” group generated clearly the most ideas compared to the other groups, and the same relation was visible in the idea cards. The reason for this may be that the home environment is the most familiar to people and as a private space they have most control over it. As they are responsible of deciding what devices and services they have at home they are also more capable of envisioning possible new services related to their needs. In the office and public environments the services and facilities are normally given to the user which does not encourage them to think about new possibilities.

All participants stressed that the services should respond to real needs in order for them to be accepted and desired. Even though they identified many needs where smart technologies might provide solutions they were sceptical towards the probability that these needs would be taken into account in the actual implementation of smart environments. One participant for example brought out the perspective of politics in the development of large systems reminding that especially standardisations that are needed for the compatibility of different systems demand political decision-making which is often based on other interests than those of the users (FG “Office”). In principal, the participants saw that smart services potentially answer to the needs of anybody since the application areas are limitless. Some participants thought that young people would be most likely to have needs for smart services when

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older generations might not be interested in them. On the other hand some participants thought that the elderly and disabled would benefit greatly from smart environments. When asked if they would use these smart services themselves most of the participants answered yes, on condition that they would consider the service useful.

Some of the focus group participants were critical towards smart environments in general and many had reservations towards them. The views of these people are important in the development of smart environments and services because they still are affected by these systems as they live in the environments even though they would not use the technologies. The main concerns were related to the ease of use and reliability of the technologies. Several participants commented that computers will always have problems and emphasised the importance of alternative solutions.

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5 APPLYING THE RESULTS

The Space Browser is a concept for a generic interface application in smart environments. It is meant to be a “window” into the digital layer of the environment showing the otherwise often invisible possibilities it offers. The name browser is adopted from the world of Internet where the browser is a way to get to the information that is scattered around the networks. In smart environments the networked information is physically scattered around the environment and to browse it means browsing the space.

I have used the focus group results in determining some essential features of the browser. The literature review serves as the basis for understanding smart environments and the possibilities they might offer for the design since the real smart environments cannot be observed. Since this is an initial concept idea it is still in a relatively rough level and the application does not contain all features that might be useful. One reason for this is also the fact that the smart environments may develop in many different directions and I did not want to limit the vision too much towards some particular kinds of environment.

Having a feeling of being in control over one’s environment is important for people, which was proven also in the focus group discussions conducted for this thesis. Smart environments have potential in helping people to satisfy this need in many ways but at the same time they can work the opposite way. The more there are different services and smart devices in the environment the more confusing it may be for the user. Therefore, I propose the Space Browser to be the medium for presenting all the services in a unified way. Its purpose is not to be a tool for using the services, even though it can be one option for it when it is useful. In that sense it is not an interface in the way that is understood in human-computer interaction because in a computer the interface is the tool to also use all the applications that are in the computer. In smart environments the devices and other objects often have their own interfaces through which they are used.

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The Space Browser is a mobile application since it is intended to be used in all kinds of environments. The universality of the concept is its key principle since the aim was to bring unity and clarity into the experience of smart environments, and to promote the experience of “smartness” as an individual entity or quality of environment, which manifests itself through the smart services. The aim is to promote the experience of the same “smartness” everywhere. The focus group results showed biggest differences in needs between the home and public environments. Therefore I took these two environments as examples in my design. I also sketched a device with which the application could be used, although the principle is that the application could be used with many different kinds of mobile devices. The device rather illustrates a future context where the Space Browser might exist.

Figure 11. Sketch of a mobile device with flexible touch-screen.

The device has a flexible, transparent touch-screen which wraps around the device and can be opened to have a larger screen. The surface of the device body is also a touch-screen, so when the flexible screen is fully opened the device provides a screen space which is three times as large as when the screen is wrapped around the body. The device can be used with either position depending on the need. The reason for the large, transparent screen is its suitability for augmented reality applications. However, a large screen does not support mobility, hence the flexibility and scalability. I will now present the concept ideas for the Space Browser in public and home contexts.

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5.1 Active layer and tracking

When the screen is stretched, it displays augmented reality content on the transparent part of the screen. The device body works as the control part of the application. The application has two modes which are presented by the active layer. When the active layer is on, all the smart services in the environment that are inside the frames of the screen are displayed. The services are mapped to the forms in the environment so that they are seen in perspective and appear as if they were attached to the real objects in the environment. In the general view which is displayed in the image below the services appear with a tag and a small description. The content in the squares are generated by the service providers.

As many of the smart services are based on observing and tracking people, privacy issues are very important. The participants in the focus groups expressed concerns about the use of information that is gathered from people and they stressed that this should never happen without the user’s knowledge. The Space Browser has a feature called Tracking which can be turned on or off. When the tracking is on, the user lets his/her information to be gathered by third parties. The interface shows always the number of parties gathering the information at the current location. The user can see who is tracking him/her and also customise in the settings who can receive the information and who cannot. When the tracking is turned off, no information about the user is released. This can, however, limit the services the user can see and use in the environment.

Figure 12. The Space Browser showing the basic view with the active layer on.

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The active layer means that the device is receiving information from the environment actively and displaying it on the screen. The information is updated in real-time and the browser can for example receive context-aware advertisements as the user is moving. When the active layer is off, it displays only the information that the user has allowed. A common setting would be to allow only alerts to be displayed. In the image below is an example of that in the home environment. This image also shows the device with the flexible screen wrapped around the device’s body. Here the view is presented through the device’s camera.

Figure 13. Space Browser with active layer off, showing only alerts.

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5.2 Viewing and saving information

In the active layer the objects can be viewed more closely by clicking on the tag. This enlarges the information box and brings it to the front of the view.

Figure 14. Clicking a tag on the view to zoom in the information.

The information can also be saved to a Notebook by dragging the object to the edge next to the Notebook. This copies the information from the spatial view to the user’s personal data. The objects saved in the Notebook can be viewed anytime and depending on the service may also be sent back to he environment for example as a link which other users can pick up later. The moving of items between the environment and the device happens always by swiping them between these different parts of the interface.

Figure 15. Saving information from the environment by dragging it against the Notebook edge.

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5.3 Searching information

There is a possibility to search information in the environment. In this device, when the screen is rolled open, the search is written in the control part of the application and swiped to the view, where the search is generated. Multiple searches can be done at the same time.

Figure 16. Searching information in the environment by dragging the search word on the view.

5.4 Manipulating the environment

The Space Browser can also be used for manipulating the environment. This does not mean using the smart services and applications but creating them by connecting different devices and objects to each other and defining how they interoperate. This feature is closely related to the Phi/o Fusion project at VTT where such an application is under development. The combining of objects is best suited to the home environment where the inhabitants have control over their own environment. In public environments such possibilities are rare. Since the manipulation of the smart environment was outside of the scope of this concept creation process, I present the feature in a very general level. The design of an application which lets users to combine objects freely and define their cooperation in an easy way is challenging and would need more investigation than I was able to do in this study. In my example the combining of the objects is done with a combination of augmented reality and NFC technology. The state of the objects can be viewed with the AR technology and the combining happens quickly with touching the objects with the device.

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Figure 17. Combining the objects with each other by touching them with the mobile device.

These examples presented a future vision of the Space Browser concept. AR technologies are not yet that advanced in recognising 3D objects in the environment so today’s solution would have to rely on visual tags attached to the objects in the physical environment for enabling their recognition.

Figure 18. An example of the Space Browser interface realisable with current technologies, i.e.

augmented reality with matrix codes attached on the objects.

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6 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

The goal of this thesis was to understand the specifics of human experience in smart environments and the implications it has for design. My first research question was: What are the characteristics of user experience that are specific to smart environments?

The answer to the first question relies on the comprehensive literature review on both smart environments and user experience because smart environments still remain on the level of visions and therefore are hard to study with empirical methods. The main finding regarding this question is that the experience in smart environments exists in two levels which both must be considered in order to understand the complex phenomenon of experience. The smart environments are technologically constructed by smart services and ubiquitous computing which are used in the physical context. When observed at the level of service or product use the smart environment is part of the context affecting user experience like other contexts. Here the existing models of UX which include context are sufficient in understanding the phenomenon. The other level in the experience of smart environments is experiencing the physical context itself. On the one hand this is the more general, holistic experience which Roto (2006) distinguishes from user experience. People experience their surroundings constantly but passively through their perceptions. On the other hand, since the environment is interactive and communicates with the human, the relationship is not only passive (e.g. Ciolfi & Bannon 2005). People are interacting with the environment in which case the physical context becomes the “product” of UX.

This “product”, however, is an invisible one and spread around the environment. It consists of immaterial or otherwise invisible connections between different devices in a space and it is “smartness” rather than something tangible. Therefore, it is not self-evident that people will be conscious about the smart layer. User studies show that smart environments where the interaction is implicit and the technology is hidden to the point of maximum invisibility and subtleness of actions, the people do not experience that they are interacting with a smart environment. I claim that in this case the users are given the wrong mental model of the interactive environment. Instead of presenting the smart environment as a unity it either hides the smartness effectively or gives the image that the smartness resides

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only in the products themselves, not in the underlying infrastructural layer which enables the connectivity and interoperation. This has implications on the usability of the smart products and services in the environment because the users may not know when they are interacting in the right way in the case of hidden technologies; or in error situations the cause of the error may easily be misunderstood (Norman 2004). Moreover, it has implications to the user experience because when the user does not understand the functions and interaction in the environment it can cause feeling of loss of control (Schiphorst 2007).

Based on this finding about the experience in smart environments I conclude that smart environments are experienced in different levels simultaneously and the experience is more holistic than the experience of product use, including the experiences of being in and living with the environment. This has implications to the design and development of both smart devices or services, the interaction with them and the environment, as well as the underlying infrastructure that enables these. Experiencing the context must be taken into account in the design of them all.

As a response to the development towards the “disappearing” computer I further conclude that there is a need for a universal and coherent interface for the smart environments. This interface is not meant to be the only medium through which the user would interact with the system because the tangible and other natural interaction methods are the force of ubiquitous computing technologies. Instead, the interface should provide a view on the digital layer of the environment and present its possibilities for interaction. This would promote the understanding of the different smart products and services as part of the same “smartness” and support the coherence in the experience of smart environments. Furthermore, a generic interface would guide the designers of the smart products, applications and services to follow some unified principles in their designs. This might include for example universal symbols or forms and logic of interaction. It is clear, however, that such an interface is relevant only in the future if and when the amount of ubiquitous computing applications is so great that they form actual smart environments. One ubiquitous application does not yet need a special spatial interface.

The second part of the thesis aimed at creating an initial concept for a generic interface for smart environments called the Space Browser. I took a human-centred design approach to this task and my second research question was: What are users’ needs and expectations for interaction in different types of smart environments?

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I used two qualitative user research methods, focus groups and “idea cards”, to answer the research question. The results of these studies indicate that the users mainly appreciate efficacy, control and independence, but that some needs and expectations differ between different types of environments. From the home, office and public environments the biggest differences in needs were found between home and public environments. In the home environment independence was emphasised and in the public environment the central need was security. The other purpose of the focus group discussions was to gather users’ expectations for interaction in smart environments in order to inform the design of the Space Browser concept. The interaction was expected to be natural, easy and well adaptable to different situations and different needs of people.

There are some limitations to the applicability of the results. It is not possible to generalise the results because of the qualitative nature of the research and small amount of participants. The users are also not always able to identify and express their needs (e.g. Kujala 2002) which affects the validity of the results as an accurate representation of users’ needs. Furthermore, the users tend to give rationalised responses in social situations in order to give a good impression about themselves and to please the researchers (Jordan 2000, p. 161), and this may give emphasis to the wrong needs. Other methods such as observing or probing might have given more accurate information about the needs. However, the results provided useful material for ideating and sketching the Space Browser concept. The identified differences in needs between the different environments were especially useful and something that might have remained unnoticed otherwise. My conclusion to the user study results is that getting knowledge about user experience when the object of experience does not yet exist is challenging but is still useful and should be done.

I used the information from the literature review and the user research results in sketching an initial vision of the Space Browser which is intended as an interface application for smart environments. The purpose of the browser is to bring controllability into the interaction with a complex smart environment and promote coherence of the experience in these environments. The browser is meant to be used in all types of environments.

Finally, I discuss some general issues related to smart environments and UX research. Rogers (2006) takes a critical view on Weiser’s vision which she assumes to have failed due to its reliance on strong AI (AI that is close to or at the level of human intelligence). She argues for a change of course in the development of ubiquitous computing to concentrate on empowering people to be proactive and creative rather than trying to create an environment that would be proactive on the behalf of humans. This means giving up the

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efforts to achieve strong AI and concentrating on already available weak AI (AI that is able to do advanced problem-solving but does not have to correspond to human intelligence) and practical solutions that it can offer for the creation of smart environments. This supports other efforts to bring the human experience to the forefront in technological development as the design deals with applying more ready technologies to existing needs and a more human-centred approach can be taken.

In this light the term smart environment may not be very “smart”. It is normative, indicating that those environments are positive, which obviously is not guaranteed and depends entirely on how the environments are designed. The environments may even function smartly according to the logic of the technologies but at the same time be anything but smart from the human perspective. Indeed, the prefix smart has suffered inflation because it is so widely used in relation with almost any device or system that has some embedded computing power in them. Smart phone, smart car, smart home, smart washing machine and smart-whatever are often justly criticised because of their expected intelligence which remains unsatisfactory with current technologies. However, I see the attribute smart as justified when discussing future visions where the smartness is a desirable feature.

UX research and design has become an established field besides usability. The importance of addressing users’ needs and providing them with pleasurable experiences is widely acknowledged. It is also considered important to get deeper knowledge about user experience and its building blocks in order to design for good UX. However, despite the efforts the field has still not been able to constitute a unified conception of the essence and definition of user experience (Law et al. 2007, 2009). On the other hand the solution might be in not trying to reduce the complex phenomenon of experience to a measurable item but accept its ambiguity, trying to understand it in a holistic manner and using it without measuring (Wright & Blythe 2007).

This thesis takes a broad view on user experience from different angles and contributes to the UX research field by increasing knowledge about user experience in smart environments. It also provides insights into the users’ needs and expectations towards different types of smart environments. The results of the study can be used in design practice on both product and environment level.

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APPENDIX 1 1(5)

Ideas from the focus groups and idea cards

APPENDIX 1 2(5)

APPENDIX 1 3(5)

APPENDIX 1 4(5)

APPENDIX 1 5(5)

APPENDIX 2

The number of ideas per each focus group and cards

The number of ideas related to each need. Note: several needs could be attributed to one idea.