Tailored Scenarios: A Low-Cost Online Method to Elicit Perceptions of Home Technologies Using Participant-Specific Contextual Information

The introduction of new ubiquitous computing technologies has the capacity to greatly affect the home, a space that is core to human experience, yet remains understudied owing to its sensitive, semi-private nature. Scenario-based methods have previously been used to collect home technology design responses but they have tended to over-simplify the social contexts involved, and have not taken into account the unique circumstances of the respondents. Technology probes have also been used but suffer from increased costs in research time and effort and a corresponding reduction in participation, as well as decreased acceptance owing to their invasiveness. We present ‘Tailored Scenarios’, a new method for eliciting participant responses involving home-based technologies that dynamically presents participants with scenarios, based on their home contexts, into which new technologies are installed. ‘Tailored Scenarios’ use self-reported contextual data to customize each scenario. We present the method, and report findings from a case study in which we compared responses to ‘Tailored Scenarios’ with those from traditional scenarios and technology probes. Our findings suggest that ‘Tailored Scenarios’ is an improvement over standard scenario methods in terms of eliciting attitudes towards technology and are easier to implement at scale than technology probes.