Paper Reading #14: Eden: Supporting Home Network Management Through Interactive Visual Tools

Comments
Patrick Frith
Alyssa Nabors

Reference Information
Title: Eden: Supporting Home Network Management Through Interactive Visual Tools
Authors: Jeonghwa Yang, W. Keith Edwards, David Haslem
When/Where: UIST 2010

Summary
Network management is now necessary in most households, even though management systems for networks are mostly designed for business purposes, making management a confusing chore for non-technical users. This paper discusses Eden, an interactive home network management system to help alleviate this problem by simplifying the network management process, making it easier to do actions necessary for a household network. Overall, it is hoped that the program can actually teach non-technical users more about how their networking systems operate.

A screenshot of Eden's user interface. Source: Article

Eden's user interface consists of an image representation of a home, separated into rooms with pictures to represent devices. Lines connecting devices demonstrate the topology of the network. Dragging and dropping can be done to perform network tasks on devices, including assigning "badges" to devices that designate such things as which devices should have network preference over others and setting parental controls. Devices in put in a specific room have the room's preferences applied to it, and movement of a mobile device throughout the house does not affect its room designation.

This project started development by conducting user studies to determine what kind of needs the typical user has of a networking system, including what kind of current systems are good and what additional features users would like to see in such a system in the future. From this, a range of tasks were defined, including membership management, access control, network monitoring, and bandwidth priority. Many different prototypes were created with this model, then tested to determine the best display and interaction setup for the system. The actual system was then created, and then user tested again for evaluation purposes. Overall, many users found the system understandable and helpful.

Discussion
I think Eden is a very good idea to help non-technical users easily manage their home networks. This seems like a product that is both necessary and helpful. With its additional networking features (as opposed to business network management systems), it could help everyday people to accomplish tasks that they previously thought were impossible, such as putting different security controls on only certain computers in the household network. I believe that the fact that the system design was largely directed by user studies is one of the reasons why it seemed to be so successful. If more products used this user-centered design, maybe there wouldn't be so much confusion and problems with a large number of software products.