Smart Home Heating Control Panel

Question: Describe about the Smart Home Heating Control Panel. Answer: The Smart Home Heating Control Panel was aimed at designing a user interface that could easily take up the functions that are currently provided by a control panel mounted on the walls. The primary objective of this project was to design the user interface to be used for controlling the thermostat in accordance to the principle guidelines of interface designing, to develop the said designs using software tools, to evaluate the according to various usability evaluation techniques and to finalize the designs. Needless to say, any changes to the hardware components of the thermostat or that of the control panel were way out of the scope of the project. Before the designing process began, a session was conducted for collecting information regarding the various operations that the sad thermostat is capable of. The information provided by the manufacturers indicated that the thermostat currently supports three modes of heating: heating by hot water, heating by hot air, heating by steam and heating by electricity. All of the said modes can again be utilized to set up certain temperature zones': these specialized settings comes to use when the user does not want to change the heating mode or temperature of the room each time the thermostat is put on. The manufacturers of the said thermostat also conveyed to us the fact that they want to provide their users with certain unique functionalities: the higher management of the manufacturing organization had envisioned the design of the user interface to be capable of supporting functionalities which would allow the customers to preheat the rooms. These discussions lead us to believe that the following are the business requirements of the said project: i. Manual temperature control: The interface being designed should allow the users to change the temperature settings of the thermostat, so as to control the temperature of the room, in a manual mode. ii. Quick temperature control: The interface being designed should allow the users to change the temperature settings of the thermostat, so as to control the temperature of the room, using the quick temperature settings. iii. Personalized temperature control: The users should be capable of using various customized settings functionalities to control the room temperature. iv. Automated temperature control: The automated temperature mode of the thermostat should also be supported by the user interface. v. Turn off / Turn on / Reset: The user interface should provide the users options for turning on the thermostat, turning it off when not required and resetting it. vi. User Interaction: The user interface being designed should allow human interactions. vii. Display: The graphical user interface should essentially display the various functionalities available for controlling the thermostat. viii. Ease of Use: The user interface being designed should be easy to use. Once the business requirements of the manufacturers were identified, we started designing the user interface: the following components were included in the design so as to meet the above mentioned requirements. Sl. No Business requirements Design component included i Manual temperature control: The user interface contains in built features for supporting Manual temperature control Ii Quick temperature control: The user interface contains in built features for supporting Quick temperature control iii Personalized temperature control: The user interface contains in built features for supporting Personalized temperature control Iv Automated temperature control: The user interface contains in built features for supporting Automated temperature control V Turn off / Turn on / Reset: In built features for turning on/ turning off and resetting the thermostat has been included in the user interface vi User Interaction: The entire interface has been designed so as to be operated by human touch. Vii Display: The user interface essentially displays the functionalities available for temperature control viii Ease of Use: The user interface has been designed keeping in mind the ease of use of the customers. It is worth mentioning that while developing the design of the user interface, the project team were cautious about the fact that the designs need to be in accordance with the Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design," as proposed by Ben Schneiderman (Schneiderman, 1986). Hence, the entire interface has been split up into several pages, besides including functionalities for redoing any action that has once been performed by the user. Last but not the least, we would like to accept the fact that our designs have been significantly influenced by several smart phone applications that are readily available in the market: however, we have only been inspiring by such designs and have not copied' any component is our interface design. Bibliography Gremeau, L. (2012). Service Providers the Smart Home (1st ed.). Nielsen, J. (2012).Thinking Aloud: The #1 Usability Tool.Nngroup.com. Sachs, O., Duvier, C., Cheney, K., Akers, C. (2012). Schneiderman, B. (1986). Eight golden rules of interface design.Disponible en. Tsopra, R., Jais, J. P., Venot, A., Duclos, C. (2014). Comparison of two kinds of interface, based on guided navigation or usability principles, for improving the adoption of computerized decision support systems: application to the prescription of antibiotics. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 21(e1), e107-e116. Tuch, A. N., Roth, S. P., HornbK, K., Opwis, K., Bargas-Avila, J. A. (2012). Is beautiful really usable? Toward understanding the relation between usability, aesthetics, and affect in HCI. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(5), 1596-1607.