Abstract

We are currently witnessing the invention of more and more smart devices, which are having an increasing impact on our daily life. Smart devices perform small tasks in our environment. Most smart devices can only be controlled by direct user interactions e.g. mobile applications, which are often limited to only one user and one smart device. This restriction is hiding potential usecases of direct smart device intercommunication, which is often impossible due to the variety of network technologies used by smart devices. Current mobile devices, such as mobile phones and tablets are providing a wide range of network technologies and are carried by the user most of the time. This makes mobile devices a great mediator to interconnect smart devices. There are already existing frameworks which provide this functionality but they are often very complex to use for users without programming experience. Therefore, the contribution of this thesis is a visual user-interface, which allows users without programming experience to connect smart devices with each other. Visual programming is used to represent devices as visible device nodes, which can be connected by edges to visualize the connection between smart devices. To collect reasonable feedback, a user study was conducted, where users had to use the visual user-interface prototype. This proved the usability of the implemented prototype and improved our belief in the necessity of this approach.