Reference information
Authors: Jeonghwa Yang, W. Keith Edwards, David Haslem
When/Where: UIST’10, October 3–6, 2010, New York, New York, USA.
Summary
In this paper, the designers address the need for easier and more intuitive network management. As it's been primarily necessary for businesses in office spaces and only recently has become available or widely used in households, network management can be confusing and tedious for non-technical users. Eden is a system designed to make the network management process easier by allowing users to perform management tasks using a simple drag-and-drop of visually represented networking devices and network settings.
A preliminary study and survey were conducted with 14 users, ranging from novices to professional network administrators, to determine their needs. Specifically, the designers wanted to find what most users find difficult, but also to find more advanced tasks performed by experts that could be made possible by less experienced users. This study yielded three main desires from users: simpler troubleshooting, and more control over security and network performance, including bandwidth priority.
Eden's interface is modeled as a space is represented by a pictoral representation of a home, with
various “rooms” contained within. Interactive graphical objects that represent users’ devices, and various network infrastructure devices, are placed within this representation, and afford dragging and dropping to perform network configuration task. Visual links between each device can be enabled or disabled by users as desired. Users' devices appear in Rooms contained within the Home. Users create and name their own Rooms in the system when it is first set up, since the system cannot do this itself automatically. These can be changed later at any time. Devices that are connected to the network appear in Rooms.
The designers evaluated Eden with a second study conducted for 20 participants, who found the Home and Room modeling to be useful and easy to understand. In addition, users were able to learn how the actual network of devices and routers worked, such that they understood the concepts of shared bandwidth arriving through a single router.
Discussion
This is an application that could be useful for a wide range of users. I can see this teaching regular users the basic concepts of network management. There are "help desk" jobs held by intermediate users who have to frequently troubleshoot network queries for novices. Eden could greatly reduce the number of these queries so that they can fix a lot of their own problems. I definitely liked that the designers conducted a formative study before developing Eden in order to understand the system's real needs. As with a few other papers I have read, this style of development is crucial to building useful and intuitive products.
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