PASHI-framework Usability Evaluation Study Interview Transcripts

This study evaluated the usability of adaptive user interfaces when used in mitigating interpersonal privacy violating scenarios. The study used storyboards as a stimulant to elicit user responses where each storyboard demonstrated how different variations of adaptive user interfaces can be used to mitigate different variations of interpersonal privacy violating scenarios. Here interpersonal privacy violations refer to privacy violations that happens between smart home users due to sharing smart home devices among themselves. There are two main variations of interpersonal privacy violations explored in this study:

• Interpersonal information privacy: Privacy related to information disclosures caused by shared smart home devices,

• Interpersonal physical privacy: Privacy related to disturbances caused by shared smart home devices.

The study used two hypothetical scenarios covering the two variations of interpersonal privacy:

1. Health information scenario (information privacy): Yasmin (care giver) tries to access the vital information of Sally (care receiver) over a smart speaker. During this, Zack (sally’s son) walks into the room who is not authorised to access Sally’s health information.

2. Meditation scenario (physical privacy): Zack (son) tries listen to music over the smart speaker while his Sally (mother) was meditating in a near-by room where his mother doesn’t want to get disturbed while she is meditating.

For each scenario, three variations of adaptive user interfaces (AAUI, CAUI, NAUI) were used to resulting in three separate outcomes. All together this created six unique scenarios. Three adaptive user interface variations are explained below.

AAUI (Automatic Adaptive User Interfaces): AUI variation, which automatically adapts without user feedback.

CAUI (Choice-based Adaptive User Interfaces): AUI variation, which provides users with choices to select the adaptation and continues the adaptations based on user feedback.

NAUI (Non-Adaptive User Interfaces): Standard smart home user interfaces which are unable to adapt according to the context.

15 participants took part in the study, and they were asked questions based on these storyboards regarding the usability of the adaptive user interfaces. This document includes the transcription of those interviews.

This study was approved by the Open University’s Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC/3417/Wijesundara).