Towards a User Feedback Approach for Smart Homes: An Explorative Interview Study

Smart homes are permeating our everyday lives. Different fast-evolving smart home technologies, various usage contexts, and heterogeneous users make it challenging to anticipate all requirements for smart homes in advance. User feedback gathered from the crowd of smart home technologies users is a valuable information source for verifying and eliciting requirements for system evolution. However, research on user feedback currently does not consider the smart home domain. Thus, we know only little about whether and how users of smart home technologies could provide feedback to support the elicitation of requirements and hence system evolution. In this paper, we present preliminary findings from our explorative interview study with smart home users on their attitudes towards feedback communication. Early results suggest that users are willing to provide feedback about their smart homes but have different needs regarding the feedback communication process. We assume the characteristics of smart home technologies (e.g., ubiquity, multimodality, connectivity) provide opportunities but also raise challenges for developing a user feedback approach in the context of smart homes.