User-driven Design Guidelines for the Authoring of Cross-Device and Internet of Things Applications.

Recently we see an increasing number of solutions for the authoring of cross-device and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. While most of these authoring tools have been realised based on existing metaphors and evaluated in subsequent user studies, there is no consensus on how to best enable end users to manage and interact with their devices, IoT objects and services. In order to establish some common guidelines for the development of cross-device and IoT authoring tools, we conducted an elicitation study exploring a user’s mental model when defining cross-device interactions in IoT environments. Existing authoring solutions have further been checked for compliance with our guidelines and we developed a fully-compliant end-user authoring tool for cross-device and IoT applications. The presented guidelines may inform the design of new as well as the improvement of existing solutions and form a foundation for discussion, future studies and refinements within the HCI community.