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Contribution to Book
Location, Location, Location: About Home Networking Devices Location and Features.
Design, User Experience, and Usability. Design Philosophy, Methods, and Tools (2013)
  • Abbas Moallem, San Jose State University
Abstract
A home. It is where people spend most of their family time. It is a place to gather friends. It is somewhere to escape the world in the comfort of someplace that is our own. And it is a location that is filled with a variety of big and small appliances and devices. The number of appliances, their size, shape, and their features change over and over again, and based on the advancement in technology, there are changes in the needs of consumers alongside a certain expectation of comfort and productivity. One of the properties of a device in a home is the location in which people place it. Where to place the device depends, among other things, on its use and the features that the device offers as well as its aesthetics. This study investigates the location of home networking devices, also known as routers, in modern houses. It also looks at how router features accommodate users based on the location where people keep the devices and how their needs have evolved.

For this study, 95 participants were surveyed about the location of their home networking devices (routers) location then, 43 locations were evaluated from houses located in Silicon Valley, California. The results provide the data on the rooms where people keep their routers, their physical location, and certain idiosyncrasies of their usage. In light of this study we have extracted some results and hypothesized some guidelines for future designs of routers in the consumer market.
Keywords
  • Home Networking,
  • Network Device Location,
  • Device Location versus Features,
  • Router Location
Disciplines
Publication Date
2013
Editor
Aaron Marcus
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
ISBN
978-3-642-39228-3
DOI
10.1007/978-3-642-39229-0_13
Publisher Statement
SJSU users: use the following link to login and access the article via SJSU databases.
Citation Information
Abbas Moallem. "Location, Location, Location: About Home Networking Devices Location and Features." Design, User Experience, and Usability. Design Philosophy, Methods, and Tools Vol. 8012 (2013) p. 107 - 114
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/abbas-moallem/3/