“I Want It That Way”: Exploring Users’ Customization and Personalization Preferences for Home Assistants

Home assistants are becoming a widespread product, but they mostly come as a compact device and offer very few customization and personalization features, which often leads to dissatisfaction. With the technological advancements, these systems are becoming more adaptable to the users’ needs and can better imitate a human personality. To achieve that efficiently, understanding how different users envision their desired assistant is crucial. To identify people’s customization and personalization preferences and their desired personality for a home assistant, we designed a set of storyboards depicting a variety of possible features in a domestic setting and conducted a user study (N=15), including a series of semi-structured interviews. Our quantitative results suggest that users prefer an agent which is highly agreeable and has higher conscientiousness and emotional stability. Furthermore, we discuss users’ customization and personalization preferences for a home assistant, which could be considered when designing the future generation of home assistants.