Surprisingly, little research has been done on the obstacles users face in smart-home device onboarding. Most prior work focuses on difficulties that occur while smart devices are in use, which are often different from the challenges of introducing a new device to the home system.
We performed cognitive walkthroughs on 12 commercially available smart-home devices, documenting the commonality and distinctions of the onboarding process across these devices. One key challenge we noticed in our study is that the promised seamless interoperability from Matter, the new IoT standard, is not delivered in reality. Some manufacturers claim their products are compatible with Matter, but their open-box firmware does not actually support Matter.
Check out the paper for our recommendations on how to support a more user-friendly onboarding process!
Wang, Chixiang, Liam Cassidy, Weijia He, Timothy J. Pierson, and David Kotz. “Challenges and Opportunities in Onboarding Smart-Home Devices.” In Proceedings of the 25th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, 60–65. HOTMOBILE ’24. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1145/3638550.3641137.
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