Paper Reading #11 - Eden: Supporting Home Network Management Through Interactive Visual Tools

Comments:
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Reference:
Eden: Supporting Home Network Management Through Interactive Visual Tools
Jeonghwa Yang, W. Keith Edwards, David Haslem
2010 UIST

Summary:
As technology progresses, home networks have become larger and more complex.  Unfortunately, most people are unequipped to manage these increasingly confusing networks.  Eden seeks to remedy this problem by providing a visual interface to manage home networks.

The first step was determining what information needed to be presented to users.  Should low level information be presented, or should it stick with high-level information?  In what way would a user want to utilize this software?  After conducting a study, the designers determined that the top three desires of home network managers are network monitoring, security, and performance.

Several iterations of the interface were designed.  Technically inclined users preferred a tree representation, while less skilled users preferred a spatial depiction of the network.  All users agreed that there was value in having the physical arrangement of devices in the home mapped to the interface.  The final design recognizes this, and connected devices can be placed into "rooms" indicating their physical location.  New devices appear outside of the home area, but can be moved to or removed from the network with a simple drag-and-drop procedure.  A user can set device permissions and restrictions, such as blocking certain websites or preventing guest devices from connecting to other devices.  The user is even able to indicate if certain devices or applications should take precidence over other traffic.

Twenty participants were used in the evaluation of Eden.  Most described themselves as technical novices or intermediate users.  All of the participants understood the association between the virtual rooms and the physical locations in the house, but a few took the concept too far and assumed that rooms were tied to permissions.  Some took the device locations literally, assuming that a device outside the home indicated a device on the porch or in the yard.  The visual representation of network use was enormously helpful to several participants, teaching them some of the finer points of home networking.  Of the twenty participants, seventeen preffered Eden to other networking systems, and two others preffered a combination of Eden and another system.
Discussion:
I'm no stranger to home networking problems, and Eden seems like it would alleviate many issues just by making them easier to understand.  It gives the user an effective mental model of how the network behaves, and provides a simple and intuitive way to control various tasks.  I especially like the hybridization of the visual interface and technical information.  It's certainly easier learning about networks through a visual traffic map instead of searching for the correct answer on the internet.  I am curious if the evaluation participants who claimed that they could now "master" home networking ever tried to do so under different circumstances, as that would indicate a deep understanding of networks can be gleaned from something like Eden.  In any case, Eden sounds great, and I wouldn't mind using it myself.