Longitudinal user experience studies in the IoT domain
Bianca Maria da Silva Melo, Rossana M. C. Andrade, Ticianne Darin · 2022
User Experience (UX) is affected by users' emotions and motivations, among other subjective factors. Hence, changes in UX occur over time, according to the different contexts, and behavioral and internal user aspects. With the rising development of Internet of Things (IoT) systems to support daily activities and, at the same time, the increasing abandonment of these systems, the importance of ensuring good UX levels over time has become an even greater need. In this context, we conducted a snowballing procedure and systematic literature mapping to understand whether and how long-term UX evaluations have been conducted in IoT and the challenges and opportunities in conducting longitudinal studies in this field. We analyzed 55 papers that reported longitudinal evaluations in different IoT systems and 14 papers that reported UX evaluations in the IoT context. We also interviewed five software engineering professionals to learn about their IoT user-testing and evaluation perspectives. Our results provide a panorama of the conduction of longitudinal IoT studies and a glance at the directions the research on UX evaluation for IoT systems is taking. Hence, we indicate future research opportunities for evaluating long-term UX in IoT systems through the longitudinal approach, considering the complexity of these systems and their impact on users' everyday lives.