Personalized User-Carried Single Button Interfaces as Shortcuts for Interacting with Smart Devices

Florian Müller, Martin Schmitz, Markus Funk, Sebastian Günther, Niloofar Dezfuli, Max Mühlhäuser

CHI EA 2018

Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '18

TL;DR

What we did: We built a proof-of-concept prototype of a personalized user-carried single button interface for interacting with a smart coffee machine.

What we found: We found that users preferred the new system for its ease and speed, expressing that it eliminated annoyances present in the traditional coffee order process.

Takeaway: Our work demonstrates that personalized user-carried single button interfaces can significantly enhance the user experience when interacting with smart devices, making interactions simpler and more efficient.

Abstract

We are experiencing a trend of integrating computing functionality into more and more common and popular devices. While these so-called smart devices offer many possibilities for automation and personalization of everyday routines, interacting with them and customizing them requires either programming efforts or a smartphone app to control the devices. In this work, we propose and classify Personalized User-Carried Single Button Interfaces as shortcuts for interacting with smart devices. We implement a proof-of-concept of such an interface for a coffee machine. Through an in-the-wild deployment of the coffee machine for approximately three months, we report first initial experiences from 40 participants of using PUCSBIs for interacting with smart devices.

Abstract

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