Understanding the Smart Home User Control Experience
Elizabeth Parks
39 year old family market research & consulting business ? Smart Home ? Energy ? Streaming ? CTV ? Broadband ? Connected Health ? SMB ? Multifamily ? Market Research ?Consulting ? Marketing Services ? Thought Leadership
The smart home will achieve significant penetration and widespread adoption among consumers, but the rate and speed of adoption are dependent upon companies telling a story to consumers in a method that resonates and provides beneficial value. As connectivity in the home increases year-over-year, smart home players have a chance to capitalize on and push the smart home forward. No single company holds the future in its grasp.
Despite the promising future and the smart home’s remarkable potential, there has so far been a disconnect between market hype and actual consumer behavior. Many consumers familiar with smart home products are uncertain about pricing, providers, capabilities, and benefits, indicating the need for more aggressive marketing and consumer education.
Common barriers to smart home adoption have included interoperability, solutions lacking clear value propositions, high upfront costs, battery life limitations, difficult installation, and security/privacy concerns. Many of these issues will be resolved with emerging technologies that address these barriers, opening the gate to broader adoption in the near term.
APP EXPERIENCE
Unfortunately for smart home app developers, the perfect unified app experience is in the eye of the beholder. There’s no industry that features uniform consumers but only the most challenging ones include consumers who are opposites. Our research shows that different types of smart home consumers have different needs and wants that may contradict each other.
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What is clear is that nearly all home device owners are interested in a unified app. Respondents were instructed to imagine a single unified app that could control all of their smart home products. They were then asked from what type of company they would most like to receive such an app. More than 8-in-10 were interested in a unified app, but disagreed on the source. While smartphone OS provider has a small edge, the consumers are split evenly across options. With no clear choice among consumers, the opportunity exists for an excellent app to become the biggest and best.
This research is an excerpt from All Apps Aren’t Equal: ?Smart Home User Experiences, which provides an in-depth examination of the user experience among smart home app users. It evaluates consumers’ interaction and control preferences when using different smart home devices. This consumer study quantifies:
Thanks for reading our research. We welcome all comments and feedback. Thank you for your support of Parks Associates work. If you have products or solutions in this area, please reach out to me so I can connect you with our team.
Founding Editor of Modern Health Talk, retired IBM technologist, market strategist, futurist, consumer advocate, consultant, author, and speaker
2 年Sadly for marketers, the promise of the smart home has eluded us for more than 60 years, as I discuss in my article at mHealthTalk.com/elusive-smart-home/. This “emerging” market has been unable cross the wide chasm between early adopters and early majority that Geoffrey A. Moore wrote about in his series of books in 1991. I still recommend his books (on Amazon), because he describes what it would take.
Entrepreneur, investor, expert in home security, smart home and presence detection by RF signals from phones and wearable devices.
2 年Unified control went a long way forward and can be achieved with voice assistants and smart home hubs which also solve the interoperability issue. And yet, we are still talking about adoption barriers because, in my opinion, the biggest barrier relies in the low value for money that most smart home devices actually provide by just replacing traditional MANUAL control methods (switch, remote, key) with modern, still MANUAL control methods (app, voice) which don’t neccessarily provide better user experience. My feeling is that once smart home will provide users with proactive, learning, autonomous interactions, the value will be there for massive adoption.
Research at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs
2 年One issue that arises here is controls from different manufacturers using different user interface 'elements' (symbols, colors, metaphors, terms, physical mappings, sounds, etc.) to mean the same thing, and sometimes the same element to mean different things. This is pointless confusion. In MANY other contexts we use user interface standards - think a car dashboard, or the phone number keypad. 20 years ago I wrote IEEE 1621 on power control of electronics (turning things on and off). There is an ANSI/NEMA standards committee currently working on such a standard for lighting control. We need others, such as one for climate control, battery charging, and more. A common app accomplishes this, but we will always interact with other controls, in the various commercial and residential buildings we pass through in our work and home lives, so UI standards are critical for a good user experience. [email protected] - nordman.lbl.gov . Thanks.