Conception of Smartness: A Design Research on User Experience of Smart Artifacts

Abstract

The domestication of smart artifacts has transformed our homes into hybrid environments of physical and digital worlds. It also has been changing our mindsets, behaviors, meaning attributions to, expectations from, frustrations about, and interactions with smart artifacts. By extension, the smartness definition is reconstructed by users who are the subject of smart artifact experiences. The current study is aimed at uncovering the user experience of smart artifacts with a focus on cognitive and emotional aspects to better understand what users expect when an artifact is identified as “smart.” Therefore, an online research study is conducted to gain insight into the user experience of smart artifacts from content-rich reviews on e-commerce websites. Robot vacuum cleaners, smartwatches, and smart speakers were chosen as exemplary smart artifacts of the study. Because they offer different types of interaction with distinct aspects, our findings indicate that smartness is associated with trust in expertise, emotional engagement, exaggerated evaluation, and intriguing existence concepts about Emotional UX. In Cognitive UX, smartness relates to reducing mental workload, gratifying experience, perceived phenotype, reciprocal acquaintance, trust-building experience, tailored situatedness, shaping sociality, physical competency, and dual enhancement concepts. These findings demonstrate the potential of conceptualization in the early stages of smart artifact design processes.