What makes a smart product feel smart?
PhD research on how people perceive smartness in everyday IoT devices, and what that means for designing them.
BRAND
Istanbul Technical University
ROLE
UX Researcher
DEFENDED
2025
THE QUESTION
Smart artifacts are turning homes into hybrid physical-digital environments, yet how people decide whether something is “smart” has been overlooked. Prior work measured specs and usability, not the lived, emotional, and cognitive experience.
My research asked how the emotional and cognitive dimensions of UX shape perceived smartness in IoT-powered artifacts.
Smartness is not what an artifact does; it's what a user feels.”
RESEARCH QUESTION 1
How do cognitive and emotional aspects of UX influence perceived smartness?
RESEARCH QUESTION 2
How do affordances and interaction modes affect UX and perceived smartness?
RESEARCH QUESTION 3
How do individuals give meaning to smart artifacts, their UX, and their smartness?
WHAT I STUDIED
Autonomous . mobile . physical
ROBOT VACUUM CLEANER
Operates independently, takes over physical labour, navigates the home: raising autonomy, context-awareness, and trust-when-things-go-wrong.
Wearable . body-adjacent
SMARTWATCH
Always on the body, blurring the line between user and artifact: identity, enhancement, permanent connection.
Voice controlled . ambient
SMART SPEAKER
A new grammar of use: language competency, personality attribution, an AI presence in the home.
HOW I STUDIED?
A phenomenographic, multi-phase study: A pilot to stress-test the tools, thematic analysis of unsolicited e-commerce reviews, and a week-long naturalistic study with ten participants living with all three devices; a robot vacuum, a smartwatch, and a smart speaker, at home: WhatsApp diaries, questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and a Miro mapping session with think-aloud.
WHAT I FOUND?
Three rounds of thematic analysis surfaced seven experiential conditions; not a taxonomy, but the situations and qualities that make a device register as smart (or not), organized under two dimensions.
EMOTIONAL UX
Affective responses and bonds: satisfaction, trust, frustration, and anthropomorphizing (participants named devices “Mr. Kaplan”, “Katya”, “The Tasmanian Devil”).
KEY CONCEPTS . Emotional engagement, intriguing existence.
It’s like getting to know each other, after 3-4 times you talk to it like a human being.
Participant 06
It has become the product that I love and value most in my home. Why haven’t I taken it for years; truly a savior.
Participant 13
COGNITIVE UX
Mental workload and interpretation: cognitive efficiency, perceived phenotype, and trust built or broken (a disconnection instantly reads as “not smart”).
If I am doing something wrong, it could give me suggestions: it can send it like app news, which is not a very difficult thing.
Participant 12
When I try to search for something in Turkish (song, etc.), we don’t get along very well.
Participant 04
COMPETENCY ENHANCEMENT
The need to intervene in errors.
CONNECTIVITY
Smartwatches acting as smartphone extensions.
CONNECTIVITY
Disconnection implies being "not smart".
WHAT IT MEANS FOR DESIGN?
Perceived smartness is a relational, experiential outcome, not a spec.
For design: Emotional engagement, human-like interaction, and intriguing-existence, habit-forming behaviors are levers for perceived smartness, not decoration.
An artifact that exceeds expectations in unexpected ways feels smarter than a technically superior but emotionally flat one; and how it fails shapes smartness as much as how it succeeds.
WHAT I LEARNED?
Perceived smartness is built through interaction quality, not feature lists; a finding I now apply directly when designing IoT-assisted product experiences.
PROCESS DEEP DIVE
The findings rest on a multi-phase study. The full method and thesis detail are here.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Before designing the study, I mapped how existing research defined "smart" across different characteristics; surfacing the gaps in lived, emotional, and cognitive experience this research would go on to address. These gaps shaped the pilot study design below.
PHASE 1. PILOT
Two participants stress-tested every research artifact; the key revision was replacing a printed diary with WhatsApp for real-time capture.
PHASE 2. ONLINE STUDY
Three-round thematic analysis (Atlas.ti) of reviews from Trendyol, Hepsiburada, n11, and Amazon; how real users describe smart devices when no researcher is present.
PHASE 3.
MAIN STUDY
Ten participants, three devices, one week at home: diaries, questionnaires, interviews, and Miro think-aloud mapping.
FRAMEWORK DEFINITIONS
Each of the seven conditions was identified through thematic analysis of the main case study, grouped under two parent dimensions of user experience.
EMOTIONAL ASPECTS OF UX
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Emotional Engagement . Users characterize, humanize, and name smart artifacts (e.g., "Mr. Kaplan," "Katya"), forming companion-like emotional bonds that sustain continued use even through friction.
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Intriguing Existence . Artifacts read as smart when they motivate users toward a goal (fitness, language learning) or surprise them with unexpected, delightful behavior.
COGNITIVE ASPECTS OF UX
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Gratifying Experience . Perceived smartness is relative: users judge it against other brands, models, or even their own unaided effort, and reward artifacts that exceed expectations.
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Competency Enhancement . Artifacts perceived as smart act as facilitators, extending the user's physical or mental capacity and freeing up time or attention.
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Connectivity . Smartness is tied to how reliably an artifact connects the user to the internet, other devices, and other people; disconnection sharply damages the perception.
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Desirability . An artifact's aesthetic appeal and its effect on the user's social identity (being seen as modern or tech-forward) shape whether it's perceived as smart and worth owning.
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Identity Attributions to the Artifact . Familiarity, flexibility, comprehensibility, and trustworthiness; including being novice-, age-, pet-, and child-friendly, determine whether an artifact earns the label "smart."
FOR RESEARCHERS
Contributes a framework of seven experiential conditions and validates phenomenographic, multi-tool longitudinal methods for HCI.
