Design of Remote Control for Smart Home Using Interaction Design Method

Smart home devices are mostly controlled using mobile application and touch-screen device which are expensive and fragile. There are cheaper and more solid controller which is button-based remote control, however it has enormous buttons that are confusing. This paper proposes a development of button-based remote control which is equipped with simple LCD screen. The LCD screen is accessorised in the remote control to reduce number of buttons and give visual feedback to users. The remote control is utilized for simple on-off operation and dedicated for Indonesian users. Its design method apply Interaction Design Method as guidance to maximize its usability. The method consists of following steps: (1) What is wanted, (2) Analysis (3) Design (4) Prototype, (5) Implementation and Deployment. The prototype was build using Arduino Nano as microcontroller, small LCD screen and push button switches. The remote control was first tested in functionality for design verification and it shows good performance to comply every given tasks. Afterward, user-participation test was conducted with 30 respondents. Based on the observation of user performing 8 tasks of swithcing on and off four smart home devices (gate, lamp, sprinkle and electronic devices) using the developed remote-control for the first time, average excecution time for each task is 9.2 seconds. Furthermore, USE quistionnaire given to users after experiencing the remote-control showed that its usability in terms of usefullness, satisfaction, ease of use and ease of learning achieved mode of grade 4 in 1-5 Likert scale.