Designing Smart Home Interfaces: Traditional vs Virtual Prototyping

This paper presents a structured User Centered Design (UCD) method to design and develop a highly usable smart home platform to manage the energy consumption of connected appliances. It exploits advanced Tangible Augmented Reality (TAR) technologies to virtually prototype the conceived design solutions and carry out usability testing with sample users. Usability tests are carried out both on traditional high fidelity prototypes and on an innovative Tangible Augmented Reality prototype. Experimental results prove the efficiency of the UCD approach supported by virtual prototypes, instead of traditional ones, the reliability of TAR prototypes to detect usability problems and assess user satisfaction, and its high interaction quality. Advantages obtainable by implementing the proposed structured UCD approach for web interface design, in the context of smart home, are discussed.