Paper Reading 11 - Eden: Supporting Home Network Management Through Interactive Visual Tools

Comments
Patrick Frith
Jessica Gonzales

Reference Information
Eden: Supporting Home Network Management Through Interactive Visual Tools
 - Jeonghwa Yang, W. Keith Edwards, and David Haslem
 - UIST 2010, New York, New York

The main Eden interface.

Summary
Eden is a tool designed to simplify the management of home networks.  It is a more visual representation of the home network, and is geared towards making management easier for the novice users.  Most software available to manage networks is meant for the enterprise level, and is far too complicated for most other users.

When first thinking about how to design Eden, the designers had to decide which elements to include in the interface.  If they included too many, the user could get overwhelmed.  In order to find out which ones most users would need, they conducted a study.  And in this study, they first wanted to find which actions could already be done with existing tools.  Then they turned to 14 users of varying skill level to find other desirable actions they should implement in their design.

PacketTrap: an enterprise-level program.

After giving the users surveys and conducting interviews, they found the main three elements the users wanted for network management.  These were a way to see the network status at a glance, easy to access security features, and control over the network performance.  To aid in design, the designers divided all the needs into either membership management, access control, network monitoring, or the quality of service policy for bandwidth priority.

Before beginning design, the users were shown a myriad of different interface implementations.  The top choice was used for the design, and the finished product was given to the same 14 users.  In addition to Eden, the users were also asked to perform tasks using OS/Router configuration, Network Magic (an alternative similar to Eden), and Network Magic and Eden combined.  The vast majority of users preferred Eden alone over all the other choices in the trials.

For future research, the designers plan to expand Eden in many ways.  As an immediate goal, they would like to add the ability of remote home network administration.  They also mentioned a main issue they want to address, which is different support for home access controls.  They did not fully take into account the power relationships in the home for the first study.  By doing so, they believe they can improve this aspect of Eden greatly.

A couple of the potential design layout options.

Discussion
I usually don’t mess with my home network too much.  If I can get internet and I can transfer files when I want to, that is good enough for me.  However, it would be very nice to have easy ways to view network traffic.  I have had times when the network seems to be bogged down by some unknown reason.  I know there is some way to check this via the command line in Windows, but I admit I am too lazy to find out how.  And even when I do find out how, I would prefer a more visual way of doing this.  I really like this Eden idea, and I feel there is a huge market for it.  I don’t mind not having it since I can usually figure out how to do what I want.  But there are a lot of households that I am sure could benefit greatly from Eden.