Why should home networking be complicated?

In today’s life, an Internet connection in a home can be considered a utility like a telephone or even to some degree electricity. Not having an efficient home network is like having just one electrical outlet in the whole house versus having outlets throughout the house and being able to plug in all your appliances at once any time you want. Networking devices from wireless routers to storage, to digital media receivers and so on, are more and more available on the market and their speed and quality of reception constantly improves. Despite these hardware improvements, the software parts that enable users to interact and manage the extended functionalities of these devices are still very complicated and out of reach for average home users. In the competitive market of networking device manufacturing companies, limited resources are allocated to improve the ease of use of the user interfaces (UIs) where users interact with the devices on a daily basis. This paper presents the main issues in home network software usability, based on survey results and empirical observation, and describes a new generation of tasked-based user interfaces for NETGEAR devices, enabling home networking users to easily set up and interact with their devices.