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Not much is certain in technology and design, except for one pattern we’ve seen time and again: whenever a new class of technology becomes available, everyone wants a piece of it.
In the late ’90s it was websites, then it was apps, and now it’s connected everything, aka, the Internet of Things (IoT).
But there’s a problem for companies trying to make the most of this new market: people don’t aspire to have connected homes; we all just want to have a better life at home. As designers who think a lot about the problems and potentials of the connected home, we have some suggestions for connected-home companies.
Anticipate How Wrong a Design Could Go
Poorly designed products have always had difficulty sticking around for the long haul, and they usually leave little impact when they disappear from the landscape. The IoT amplifies this because poorly designed connected technology can do a lot more damage to the relationship between brand and customer than may be immediately apparent. On the surface, adding a bit of tech-enabled intelligence to everyday objects seems like it could do us a lot of good, but it could also make things a good deal more difficult.
Everyday consumers don’t actively seek out solutions based on new technology alone; they seek out products and services that they can relate to and feel are actually useful. The connected home, we are told, will make our lives easier, better and more efficient, giving us more leisure time with families and loved ones, and a better standard of living. That’s a great promise, but are we keeping it?
For example, let’s say you have your kitchen redone one year from now. You’ll want the motorized blinds that can be controlled by your iPhone (these are already widely available). You’ll also probably get the latest in coffee technology, a machine with a temperature sensor that helps keep the milk inside it fresh. And the Click & Grow for your indoor herb garden will likely have a solar sensorby next year, so you grab that.
John Kiechel and Louisa Heinrich
John Kiechel is a creative director at Smart Design, a global design and innovation consultancy. Louisa Heinrich is the founder of Superhuman Limited, a strategic consultancy focused on putting people first in matters of technology and business.
At some point on a beautiful, sunny day, all of these appliances will be at war over whether your blinds should be open or shut. The coffee maker will want them shut, because its priority is keeping the milk fresh. The solar-powered toaster will want them open, because it needs to charge up so it can make your breakfast tomorrow. The Click & Grow will also want them open, because your basil needs the sunshine. And who’s going to mitigate all of this? That’s right, you are. Very likely, you’ll be getting push notifications from the blinds app on your phone about every 20 seconds, saying they’re open/closed/open/closed/open/closed. Not an enjoyable experience.
Now imagine the painstaking process of going into each individual app/interface/control panel, trying to work out what the best combination of settings is to make these things play nicely together. Now imagine doing that for more and more objects in your home, garden, car, on your body… and this in a world where many people once couldn’t be bothered to change the time on their VCRs from 00:00.
And this isn’t even the only problem. Today, consumers buy kitchen appliances, and then take them home and do whatever they want with them. But if that product is “connected,” chances are it’s been pre-loaded with someone else’s idea of what a person should be doing with it. And no matter how well meaning that someone else is, when the objects we own contradict us, that’s going to be a frustrating experience.
This is a critical design consideration for the IoT. As humans, we relate to many things simultaneously, out of habit, without even thinking about it. We multitask and divide our attention; we set up our environment in the ways that best suit our individual quirks. We don’t even know how we do it half the time—if you ask an average person to describe his or her daily household habits, chances are you won’t get an accurate answer. It’s simply more subtle and nuanced than black and white. Anyone who’s ever moved in with a partner will have noticed this, and yet when it comes to connected products, we pretend it’s not a concern.
So what’s to be done?
Companies Need to Radically Rethink Their Relationship to People
It can be very productive to look at interactions in terms of the relationships at play. We can have relationships with objects and places, sure, but mostly the home is a place where our relationships with other people – family, friends, loved ones and guests – take place. The way we set up our living environments is directly related to the kind of living we wish to do. Our homes facilitate our relationships, as do the things we put in them. They collaborate with us and enable us to live our lives. So, by extension, the best thing a brand can do is help consumers be collaborators and facilitators in their homes and in their lives.
This is quite a shift from the way brands think about purely physical products, especially home appliances: the brand decides what to make and how to make it (based on a combination of technical capability and market assessment), and consumers purchase what seems most congruent with their pocketbooks and lifestyles. As soon as these items are plugged in at home, the brand is more or less out of the picture, at least on a day-to-day basis. If brands want to stick around, through the connectivity of these devices, they need to become co-creators, enabling their customers to adjust the parameters of interaction to their lifestyles, rather than interfering or causing friction. They could become collaborators, making an effort to understand how we work, to find opportunities to make our lives better and then co-create those products and services with us, allowing for and learning from the differences from person to person.
Understanding the changing nature of relationships is a first, paramount step for tech companies. But once they get that bit down, the question remains: how can they move their connected home product from geeks and early adopters to the mass market, everyday person?
Companies must:
1) Make sure you’re solving a real problem: If the need or desire isn’t there, don’t assume that technology will create that need or desire. It’s important to remember that consumers don’t have a connected home budget; they simply have a home budget. If they splurge in one area of their budget, they need to reduce another. Therefore, they should want or need your solution, regardless of it being connected.
2) Never create new problems: When it comes to being understood and widely adopted, ask yourself: is this solution a better replacement of what your consumer already has, or is it something entirely new?
The Nest Protect is an example of a device that is a better version of what consumers already own and understand. It specifically attacks common pain points, like being able to proactively program it to not go off around the kitchen while you’re cooking. However, it turns out that during a fire, billows of smoke, or consumer movement, could turn off the alarm. This benefit-turned-hazard forced Nest to recall 440,000 of its units.
Designers must make sure the ongoing benefits outweigh the ongoing maintenance. The LG Smart ThinQ oven range bases a lot of its benefits on being smartphone connected, and this connectivity provides advantages like being able to turn it off remotely (in case you forgot to turn it off before you left home). Of course, these benefits are realized through an LG app, which may or may not function on your phone, likely due to operating system capability issues. While oven ranges tend to have a consumer lifespan of seven+ years (longer for more high-end models), smartphone operating systems need to be updated multiple times per year.
3) Grow with their customers People think and buy for immediate or short-term reward more than long-term benefit. And they don’t rethink and overhaul their way of doing something, unless they are going through a major life change like becoming a parent, or buying a house. While solutions can be aspirational, they can’t be too abstract.
Sonos creates home audio systems designed to grow. Consumders doesn’t need to go “all in”: they can start small and add to the system over time as their needs and aspirations grow. On the other hand, Nest Thermostat (a great product that we like) offers the more abstract benefit of having improved control over your interior climate, and potentially lowering your power bill, benefits that are less tangible and less immediately realized than say an entertainment product. Nest is big with early adopters, but will that be the case for the mass market? Time will tell.
The relationships we have with our favorite brands can last over generations, because those brands become a productive and beloved part of our lives, supporting and helping us as we go about the things we wish to do. In this line of thinking, though, it’s important that companies be careful to not overcapitalize on this new relationship or overstep the boundary of trust (like pushing unwanted advertising to connected devices to add a new source of revenue).
When we focus on the people at the heart of the system, and don’t allow ourselves to get distracted by the shininess of new technology, we can create truly great products that make a lasting positive impact for businesses and people alike.
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