How people think about automations in smart homes

Several tools have been put forward for creating automations in smart homes both at a research and commercial level. However, often people still encounter difficulties in specifying them in order to obtain the desired behaviour. To design authoring tools in which even people without programming experience can flexibly indicate the desired automations it is important to have a better understanding of user needs and how they think and describe the automations. In this contribution, we introduce a user study with such goals and provide an initial discussion of what has emerged.