Investigating quality aspects for UX evaluation of IoT-based applications in smart cities: A literature review

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has increasingly gained prominence in developing smart cities. IoT technologies are essential resources to make smart cities more efficient and sustainable. Recent research in Software Engineering (SE) has investigated the characteristics of IoT systems and the most appropriate approaches to their design and development. The development of systems based on IoT technologies enables a continuous flow of communication in the context of a smart city by allowing different systems to interact and adjust automatically to optimize the city's operation. In an urban environment, IoT connects a vast network of devices such as environmental sensors, public transportation systems, smart traffic lights, security cameras, and more. These characteristics make these applications complex and difficult to evaluate, particularly regarding User Experience (UX) design. Recently, we performed a rapid systematic review to examine the methods and practices commonly employed for evaluating the UX in these scenarios. In our previous work, we analyzed 43 studies covering different types of IoT-based applications and areas of smart cities. In this study, we extend our analysis by exploring which quality aspects have been considered for UX evaluation and categorizing the typical applications evaluated. Our findings revealed the need for more appropriate UX instruments to assess quality aspects that consider specific features of non-traditional interfaces (e.g., haptics, gesture, speech) and smart technologies within specific interaction contexts (e.g., smart environments based on ubiquitous computing). These instruments can be expanded from established guidelines or developed from scratch as long as they are validated in practice.