User Experience In Do-It-Yourself-Style Smart Homes

Do-it-yourself (DIY)-style smart home products enable users to create their own smart homes by installing sensors and actuators. DIY smart home products are a potential solution to current problems related to home automation products, such as inflexible user controls and high costs of installation. Although the expected user experience of DIY smart home products is different from that of previous home automation products, research on DIY smart home products is still in its early stages. In this paper, we report a 3-week in situ observational study involving eight households. The results suggest six stages of the DIY smart home usage cycle and design implications for improving the user experience of DIY smart home products.