Servants, Friends, or Parents? the Impact of Different Social Roles in the Social Web of Things on User Experience

• Published in: HCI International 2022 - Late Breaking Papers. Interaction in New Media, Learning and Games Vol. 13517; pp. 175 - 186
• Main Authors: Yin, Jiayu, Dai, Qinyan, Wang, Xingyu, Xie, Sinan, Kang, Xinyue, Rau, Pei-Luen Patrick
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer 2022; Springer Nature Switzerland
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Internet of Things; Smart agent; Social role; Social Web of Things
• ISBN: 3031221303; 9783031221309
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-22131-6_13

The Social Web of Things (SWoT) is a paradigm comprising the social web and the Internet of Things (IoT), in which users can interact with IoT in the same way they use social network services. This study aims to investigate users’ perceptions and preferences of the social roles of the SWoT agents in smart home scenarios. We designed three social roles of SWoT agents by different social status levels (low: servant, neutral: friend, high: parent). A three-day within-subject experiment was conducted on 15 participants in a Wizard-of-Oz manner, followed by questionnaires and in-depth interviews. Through descriptive analysis of questionnaire data and qualitative analysis of the interviews, we found that the friend role is the most favored because of emotional connection and effectiveness. Users are not comfortable with conversations that involve their private affairs. Furthermore, most users would want to buy SWoT appliances if their price is within 120% of traditional appliances. These findings can guide the future design of SWoT agents to provide a better user experience.