Flat vs Skeuomorphic Design for Smart Home Devices: An Exploratory Eye-Tracking Study

Creating a well-integrated IoT management system requires a usable user interface. Usability, which is the outcome of interface design and is affected by the experience provided when using the system, is a critical component that influences how successful an interface is and how well users accept a system. With IoT devices spreading around us at an enormous pace in the last years, a growing research interest concerns how to design efficient interaction between users and smart devices. The experimental process in this study includes the pilot design of two interface variations of a smart home dashboard, a flat and a skeuomorphic design, with the purpose of examining which is better in terms of performance and aesthetics. The results indicate that participants performed better in the flat design environment as they managed to execute the assigned tasks easier and faster based on a set of metrics that comprised time to complete the task, as well as eye-tracking metrics (Time to First Fixation, Total Fixation Duration, Total Visit Duration, Visit Count, and Time to First Click). Moreover, users claimed that icons and controls in the skeuomorphic design took more time to recognize and use, an observation confirmed by recorded eye-tracking data. Overall, flat design is preferable in terms of user performance while skeuomorphism is preferable in terms of aesthetics as users consider it more visually appealing.