A homeowner controls their smart home devices along a spectrum of approaches, ranging from physical device control to various proxy-based control modalities. This paper studies how and why users move along this spectrum in their day-to-day lives, building upon existing research that focused only on specific interactions. We surveyed smart home owners (N = 43 users), and conducted follow-up interviews with a subset of the survey participants (N = 8). Our studies allow us to both distill specific contexts and experiences of smart home owners as they navigate the control spectrum, as well as to describe how their experiences (both positive and negative) shape their tendencies to control devices in a particular way. These insights lead us to propose practical implications for designers and researchers of smart home management systems, including the need to support flexible control scheme transitions, reduce switching costs, and account for temporal and spatial heterogeneity in the evaluation and design of control systems.

Quadratic Surveys (QSs) elicit more accurate preferences than traditional methods like Likert-scale surveys. However, the cognitive load associated with QSs has hindered their adoption in digital surveys for collective decision-making. We introduce a two-phase "organize-then-vote" QS to reduce cognitive load. As interface design significantly impacts survey results and accuracy, our design scaffolds survey takers' decision-making while managing the cognitive load imposed by QS. In a 2x2 between-subject in-lab study on public resource allotment, we compared our interface with a traditional text interface across a QS with 6 (short) and 24 (long) options. Two-phase interface participants spent more time per option and exhibited shorter voting edit distances. We qualitatively observed shifts in cognitive effort from mechanical operations to constructing more comprehensive preferences. We conclude that this interface promoted deeper engagement, potentially reducing satisficing behaviors caused by cognitive overload in longer QSs. This research clarifies how human-centered design improves preference elicitation tools for collective decision-making.

With a plethora of off-the-shelf smart home devices available commercially, people are increasingly taking a do-it-yourself approach to configuring their smart homes. While this allows for customization, users responsible for smart home configuration often end up with more control over the devices than other household members. This separates those who introduce new functionality to the smart home (pilot users) from those who do not (passenger users). To investigate the prevalence and impact of pilot-passenger user relationships, we conducted a Mechanical Turk survey and a series of one-hour interviews. Our results suggest that pilot-passenger relationships are common in multi-user households and shape how people form habits around devices. We find from interview data that smart homes reflect the values of their pilot users, making it harder for passenger users to incorporate their devices into daily life. We conclude the paper with design recommendations to improve passenger and pilot user experience.

Surveys are a common instrument to gauge self-reported opinions from the crowd for scholars in the CSCW community, the social sciences, and many other research areas. Researchers often use surveys to prioritize a subset of given options when there are resource constraints. Over the past century, researchers have developed a wide range of surveying techniques, including one of the most popular instruments, the Likert ordinal scale, to elicit individual preferences. However, the challenge to elicit accurate and rich self-reported responses with surveys in a resource-constrained context still persists today. In this study, we examine Quadratic Voting (QV), a voting mechanism powered by the affordances of a modern computer and straddles ratings and rankings approaches, as an alternative online survey technique. We argue that QV could elicit more accurate self-reported responses compared to the Likert scale when the goal is to understand relative preferences under resource constraints. We conducted two randomized controlled experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk, one in the context of public opinion polling and the other in a human-computer interaction user study. Based on our Bayesian analysis results, a QV survey with a sufficient amount of voice credits, aligned significantly closer to participants' incentive-compatible behaviors than a Likert scale survey, with a medium to high effect size. In addition, we extended QV's application scenario from typical public policy and education research to a problem setting familiar to the CSCW community: a prototypical HCI user study. Our experiment results, QV survey design, and QV interface serve as a stepping stone for CSCW researchers to further explore this surveying methodology in their studies and encourage decision-makers from other communities to consider QV as a promising alternative.

As an effective solution to the approximate nearest neighbors (ANN) search problem, learning to hash (L2H) is able to learn similarity-preserving hash functions tailored for a given dataset. However, existing L2H research mainly focuses on improving query performance by learning good hash functions, while Hamming ranking (HR) is used as the default querying method. We show by analysis and experiments that Hamming distance, the similarity indicator used in HR, is too coarse-grained and thus limits the performance of query processing. We propose a new fine-grained similarity indicator, quantization distance (QD), which provides more information about the similarity between a query and the items in a bucket. We then develop two efficient querying methods based on QD, which achieve significantly better query performance than HR. Our methods are general and can work with various L2H algorithms. Our experiments demonstrate that a simple and elegant querying method can produce performance gain equivalent to advanced and complicated learning algorithms.