Home appliances have undergone significant transformations over recent decades, evolving into increasingly intelligent devices. The control mechanisms employed to operate these appliances have also shown significant progress, leveraging novel and often multimodal interaction modalities, including speech-based interfaces, touch and touch-less inputs, and proximity-based interactions.
Because of the intimate context in which these technologies are used, namely the home, there is the need to mindful rethink of the research methods employed to design and evaluate such novel interaction dynamics.

In collaboration with Electrolux, the present project aimed to pioneer new approaches for identifying usability issues related to multimodal interfaces within the domain of home appliances. To this end, several methodological approaches have been adopted, including ethnographic-based observations to reveal established usage practices, and the implementation virtual prototypes to elicit spontaneous gestures for devising a natural gestural alphabet. In this project, our data collection and analysis has primarily involved objective measures of users’ behavior, including computer-supported video analysis as well as in-depth interviews.

References:

Orso, V., Bettelli, A., Zamboni, L., & Gamberini, L. (2021). How Would Do that? An Agile Elicitation Technique to Explore Users’ Spontaneous Gestural Commands. In Ambient Assisted Living: Italian Forum 2019, 10 (pp. 139-152). Springer International Publishing.