Project: Intuitive tools for home network maintenance

PI: Amy Csizmar Dalal

Collaborators:
Jackie Chan '20
Sam Chen '20
Kirby Mitchell '20

Contact info:
adalal at carleton dot edu
userfriendlyhomenetworks at gmail dot com

Description

The computer networks within our home are powerhouses. Our smartphones, our tablets, our laptops and desktops, gaming systems, Smart TVs, streaming services --- they allow us to accomplish an ever-increasing list of life tasks, from work to entertainment, from financial management to health management. As the number of devices grow, the complexity of their connections --- to each other and to the Internet --- also grow.

Such complex computer networks used to only exist in the workplace or at school, with trained tech support staff at the ready to make everything work seamlessly and to fix problems as they arose. Today's complex home computer networks do not come with professional tech support, leaving homeowners and residents to fend for themselves, regardless of their level of technical expertise.

Ideally, the tools homeowners and residents use to set up, maintain, and troubleshoot their home computer networks should match the mental models they hold of home computer networks. Anyone who's provided tech support for a friend or relative knows that this is not currently the case.

This project examines the mental models homeowners and residents hold of their home computer networks, so that we can design home network setup, maintenance, and troubleshooting tools that are

User studies

We are currently conducting two studies:

Troubleshooting terminology

Technical terminology is often a barrier to home network users' expressions of desired network performance and of network problems. Text-based feedback is often used by networks to communicate system state to the user. Users seek help in online forums and search engine queries (written text) as well as through family, friends, and technical support staff (verbal). But how user-friendly is this terminology? What technical terms do users understand, and are there non-technical terms for the same concepts that they understand better?

We use card sorting to deduce understanding of troubleshooting terminology. We identify a list of words used in troubleshooting environments to describe home network performance problems, around the themes of connectivity and bandwidth utilization/capacity, extracting these terms from the transcripts of our interview study (see below) and from online tech support forums. We classify these terms into three categories: technical (used and understood by technical experts, a.k.a. the "real words" associated with a technical concept), colloquial (used and understood by non-experts), and neutral (used by experts, but understandable to non-experts outside of a technical context).

Study phases:

Want to help? Participate in our latest card sort experiment online! (Link coming soon.)

Mental models of home networks

This interview study aims to discern what mental models home network users hold of their home computer networks. By understanding existing mental models of homeowners regarding the technology within their home, we can design home network troubleshooting and maintenance tools that better serve homeowners by better fitting these mental models.

We are conducting semi-structured interviews of homeowners in the south metro area of the Twin Cities. These interviews provide some of the terminology used in our card sort experiments described above.

Interested in participating in this phase of the study? Please contact us!

Publications

Amy Csizmar Dalal, Jackie Chan, and Kirby Mitchell. 2019. A Preliminary Study of the Role of Language in Home Network Troubleshooting. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Pages LBW0272, 6 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3312856 [PDF] [Poster]