Design a Smart Home Interface

where you tap through a series of menus and options just to turn
something on or off. The old GUI model is failing.
But it‟s the future! Which means telling your home to wake you up at
7am and open the blinds on the non-sunny side of the room while getting
your coffee started and the TV set to the morning news shouldn‟t have to
involve you flipping through 4 apps and countless steps. You should just
say it before you go to sleep and the house effortlessly remembers to do
it.
From a user interface perspective, your voice is practically invisible and
has minimal learning curve. Good user interface designs of the future will
inherently eliminate as much of the learning curve as possible by
leveraging behaviors that users are already accustomed to. A good CUI
will backload all the heavy lifting of tapping through menus, selecting
options, and creating rules by understanding natural language, context,
and user intent.(Jason, 2015)
A smart home environment can be defined as “a dwelling incorporating a
communication network which connects the key electrical appliances and
services, and allows them to be remotely controlled, monitored or
accessed” In the context of energy efficiency, emerging smart grid
technologies have been applied to reduce the energy consumption of
electric devices installed at home, to seek out the lowest rates, and
contribute to the smooth and efficient functioning of the electric grid.
Although most of them are commercially available, the limited service
scalability, the complexity of configuration and the low usability prevent
their mass adoption. Rashidi and Cook have demonstrated that many of
these technologies are brittle and do not adapt to the user's explicit and
implicit wishes. It has been demonstrated that the success of a
management system for home energy efficiency is mostly determined by
its ability to motivate users to adopt it in everyday life. As motivation
passes through the usability and acceptability of home automation control
devices, they both become key requirements in device design.
A computer-based interface is then necessary to properly display
information and manage the system. The increased need of accessible and
usable human-computer interfaces has triggered research to develop
structured methods and related tools to evaluate their utility and usability.