Remote control based home automation usability evaluation
Martinez Licona, Carlos Alberto (2017)
Diplomityö
Martinez Licona, Carlos Alberto
2017
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe201708318377
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe201708318377
Tiivistelmä
Building automation (BA) has been knocking at the front doors of domestic and commercial buildings for many years. Its relevance continues to grow due to the benefits it can creates across the three pillars of sustainability: environmental, economic and social. BA enable both residential and commercial buildings to improve energy efficiency. In doing this, it can significantly contribute to saving costs, reducing CO2 emissions and providing enhanced living and working environments. In spite of these benefits and that different types of systems are available, BA has not been widely adopted yet. This lack of adoption is more notorious in homes, i.e. home automation (HA). A major barrier to this adoption is the complexity and poor usability of systems user interfaces (UI). The aim of this study is to enhance usability of home automation systems (HAS), thus contributing to a better adoption of HA, based on the inclusion of conventional remote controls into systems that are usable only via web-user interfaces or smartphone applications. Online surveys are first conducted in order to discover if users tend to control their home appliances typically with conventional remote controls or more advanced techniques. A HAS is also implemented in such a way that it can be controlled by remote controls, in addition to typical UIs. Lastly, the usability of the system is evaluated using three usability evaluation methods: Usability Testing, System Usability Scale (SUS) and Heuristics Evaluation.