SHARPENING THE VISION OF CONNECTED LIVING SPACES

The smart home of the future sits on the horizon, awaiting the onset of mass adoption. Some of us can already remotely control locks, light switches and thermostats from our phones. WiFi-enabled refrigerators let us manage our groceries, smart washers and dryers automatically adjust settings based on the size of each load, and wireless home security cameras help keep us safe.

Exciting? Most definitely. But the reality is that all these devices are confusing to most consumers, hard to install, and don’t work well with other products on the market. The smart home of today doesn’t even come close to living up to the interconnected potential of the Internet of Things. It hasn’t helped that smart home vendors have so far failed to demonstrate how their products will translate into cost savings, energy efficiency and enhanced convenience for consumers.

Our client, a global leader in commercial energy management, enlisted us in a design strategy sprint to help transform its energy platform into a unified system that will help position them to expand directly into the consumer market. 

Given that housing is the single largest financial investment people ever make, we tapped into homeowners’ strong desire to protect their properties by proposing a strategy that puts home safety and incident recovery at the forefront of the design.

PROCESS

As we set out to research what consumers want and how the market is likely to evolve, efforts were guided by a series of primary learning objectives: 1) Uncover user behaviors/needs/personalities that drive consumers to seek to control and protect their homes. 2) Identify the type of insights/data that consumers want from smart home applications.

HIGH LEVEL VIEW

We began by conducting extensive secondary research to understand how new appliances have improved energy efficiency trends, how and why consumers adopted other mainstream technologies, and the degree to which insurance considerations could influence smart home decisions.

We drew upon a wide range of IOT white papers and interviewed subject matter experts in the insurance industry and the technology sector, as well as independent energy management engineers. We also spoke directly to startups gearing up to provide new smart home services. 

CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY

Once we developed a strong understanding of the forces that will shape this emerging market, our team launched a field study to discover what real-life consumers want and expect from smart home technology. We visited with several San Francisco Bay Area individuals and families who owned or rented homes and had a least one smart home device. We observed how they currently use everyday devices and appliances in their homes, and through a series of open-ended questions, discovered how they would like to interact with smart home technology going forward.

SYNTHESIZED LEARNINGS 

Based on our research and building on existing personas from the client, we developed a series of personas and journey maps to better understand and synthesize targeted users and behaviors. 

The Urbanites wants to create a home-like environment and modernize their space. The Traditionalist is focused above all on family security and making the right early decisions. Finally, the Empty Nester is driven to protect and control their home while they're away and invest wisely to maximize their twilight years.

Our personas provided us with a great deal insight into how people want/hope/expect to interact with their smart home of the future. Our research subjects also shared their concerns about privacy and highlighted barriers that have so far kept them on the sidelines. Several key patterns and themes emerged, all of which helped identify unexpected pain points, guided our ideations workshops, and enabled us to converge around new product concepts.

CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT AND RAPID PROTOTYPING

Our key findings became the foundation upon which we created a user-friendly yet effective experience. Above all, homeowners wanted visibility, control and quick recovery and we proposed a Smart Home ecosystem designed to not only meet the needs of homeowners, but also provide tools that will enable contractors to provide the seamless services that homeowners increasingly demand.

RESULTS AND REFLECTION

The key takeaway from our research was that homeowners increasingly feel like they’ve lost visibility and control of their own homes. In response, we designed an ecosystem that will restore visibility, empower them to customize their environment, and enable them to seamlessly seek expert support when things go wrong.

Our prototype was well received by the stakeholders, homeowners and contractors who were part of this journey. While it will take time for our stakeholders to build out the infrastructure and services necessary to realize this vision, our research and design efforts have provided them with a dynamic and exciting strategy to expand into the consumer smart home market of the future.