 What I want to talk to you about today is smart home, or what I call smart home for your mom. And what I've seen and what I've worked on and what I've learned from research and talking to people is that smart home isn't really working for normal people. And that's the point of this talk today, is the subtitle there is designing connected products for the messy reality of our lives. And I think that really is the situation we're in right now, is a lot of technology doesn't really add value. We're still at the stage where it's just kind of a gimmick. So my name is Kevin Cannon. I work for a company called Frog Design, which is a product and service design consultancy. So we design products and services with companies, and we also design the strategy around those products. If you need to remember my name, if you want to follow me on Twitter, I give you a helpful way to remember my name. And so, like I was mentioned in the introduction, I've worked on a lot of different types of products, some kind of very traditional digital things, and then I've been fortunate enough to work on some connected products. So I've been involved in various different ways. Sometimes I've just been involved in doing a little bit of work on the app. Sometimes I've been involved deep in the research, and sometimes I've been involved in the overall strategy. So I've worked on a few different things, connected coffee machine, whether that was a good idea or a bad idea, we'll talk about that. But at least I was able to see, to be a little bit of a part of that, and to understand what was the decision-making process there for people. Why did they come to that conclusion, and why did they want to do it, and what was the value. I've worked on automotive projects with rear-seat entertainment that connects to phone and connects to other devices. And most recently I worked with IKEA to help bring a smart lighting product to market. This is the one that I've worked on the most, and I've spent the last two years working on this. So this is the one I will talk about the most. And so as I mentioned, like many of these products, you know, these types of things are not always successful. I take partial credit for successes and failures. And here I just want to show you some reviews. I think it's always important to find out did your work succeed or not. And here's some reviews that I've seen of my products at the same time. So this one was from The Internet of Shit. And this was, I don't want to say the brand name, but this was a connected coffee machine. And this made me feel like this. The same product got this review from The Verge. So not the worst use for the Internet of Things, but probably not the best either. And that makes me feel like this. I think, you know, this review is probably as good as you get with many connected products. So I actually see that as a partial success. The best review I've got was this one from Wired Magazine. Only one product line, not many features, and a blueprint for every smart home company out there. So that made me feel like this. So very happy to get that. But as you can see, mixed reviews. And what I want to talk today is about, I don't want to sort of say I'm amazing or anything. I want to talk about why things fail and what the challenges are and what the challenges will continue to be for designers as we work in this space. So I want to talk about why smart home isn't mainstream, why it's hard to design for, which I think is pretty unique, and what it will take to become mainstream. So smart home isn't really mainstream. We're in this situation where it hasn't really crossed the chasm from early adopters to mainstream. And when we went into people's homes and we did a lot of research, both market research and in-home research, we saw this very much. Smart home is still very much a gimmick for most people. And we're not actually here, which is quite surprising. This is what we thought before we started these types of projects. What we learned is that we're actually here, where we haven't got from these really, really early enthusiasts to the next stage. And so these types of people who are at this point, they're the people who are just excited about technology and will buy things to see if there is value. People here, which I would say many of the people in the room are here, are people who are, they're still excited, and if they think there's value, they will try it, but they want a little bit more. So we actually have to get from here to here first before we can get there. And there's a lot of different reasons, but there's two reasons I think if I sum it up is most smart home doesn't solve real problems, and it's not really delivering on its promise. So, and I think this sums it up quite well, which is that many smart home technologies, the problems that people actually have in their lives are not the problems that they're solving. So I think that's a big challenge. And to make the best example of this is something that just came out recently, which is a smart salt dispenser. This was an Indiegogo campaign, the world's first interactive centerpiece and smart salt dispenser. And this is like the perfect example of the problem that we have. The idea that anyone thought this was a good idea shows a complete lack of understanding of human nature. What's amazing about this is it's got a speaker in it, it's got lighting, but it's not actually a salt grinder, it's just a salt container. So you put it in and you pull a little tray out and you take some salt out. That's what it is. It doesn't even grind the salt. I'm very happy that this did not get funded on Indiegogo, but nonetheless that it even exists, even that someone would try to do it shows some serious problems. The second part is that some things do have value and great ideas, but then they do not deliver. So they don't deliver on the actual promise that they have. So Nest, you constantly think like this, I don't want my thermostat to reboot and restart. You see things like this, you can't read the text right there, but this is from a connector juicer and it says, the press needs to be connected to Wi-Fi to make juice. Let's get it connected. Let's just think about that for a moment. It's fine that we add connectivity to things. That can be useful and offer value, but I don't need it to be connected to Wi-Fi just to make some juice. That's a fundamental flaw and this type of thing is throughout all of these products. The interesting thing about this is that we've been here before. We start to think about Smart Home as new, but if you look at cartoons like the Jetsons or TV shows from the 50s and 60s, we've been around, we've done this many times. I think designers always look to the future when sometimes we should look a little bit more to the past. So I want to give us a little bit of a history lesson. So this is for a product called a Clapper. Maybe some of you guys remember this, so you actually clap and the lights turn on, the lights turn off. There's some really amazing music in this video. It's super cheesy in the 80s. They have this extra security feature that when you are away from home, it turns off on automatically. So the idea is if your burglar comes along and he tries to steal it away, it opens up and then here you have this woman kind of using it, which is fantastic. It's okay, there's no more video. So what I think is amazing about this is many, many levels, but the themes are still the same, like security, remote control, convenience and safety. They're all the same themes that you see now. So it does show that the fundamental human needs are the same. What's hilarious about this is that the video is really old, but if you notice there's actually a web address here, which means you can still buy it. So it's not entirely a failure actually. And the nice thing is on Amazon, so you can go and read the reviews. I wish I could go back in time and kick myself in the head for buying these. This is a real review, I swear to God. The problem is, like I said, it doesn't deliver on the promise. So when you clap, it turns on and off, but when a dog barks, it turns on and off. When the TV's on, it turns on and off. And they have a nice scene in the video where the person claps and their stereo turns on and it starts playing classical music. And the problem with that is that stereos don't turn on when you plug them in, right? It just turns power on and off, but they don't actually turn on. It doesn't let them go into a standby mode, the vast majority. So what they're showing in the video is actually not even technically possible. And so you see a lot of this type of stuff in Smart Home where, yeah, theoretically with the right combination of things it will deliver value, but in reality it won't. And the problem with all these glitches, I think, is there's a big problem which is we don't expect internet-like glitches from the real world. We don't want this from our locks and from our light bulbs and for our taps. Our tolerance for failure is completely different than it is for our phones. So our phones, you know, if something reboots, if an app crashes, it doesn't really matter. You open it up again. It's no big deal. But if our lights break or our door locks break, we have real issues there. You know, it's incredibly annoying. And then also there's potential issues for safety as well. So it's quite a different challenge to work in the home. So I want to talk a little bit about what we did and how we tried to address some of these issues. So this was, again, just to recap, this is a smart lighting product by IKEA. So you have some smart lights. You can change color. You can set timers, things like this. You have a remote control component. And then there's a gateway which sort of allows it all to talk to each other, which I'll touch again on a little bit more later. And there's an app. But first, I love this comparison. It's the difference between a regular light and a smart light. So regular light, get up, flick switch, sit down. Works really well. Smart light. Find phone, unlock phone, find app, open app, navigate to light, turn light on, put phone away. And it's really amazing is that so many products, they just accept that. And they think that has value to people. But when we did the research, we found out this is a real struggle for people. It's very obvious, you know, all research is obvious after the fact. You're like, yeah, that makes sense. The question is, what can you do about it? And when we realized this, we reframed our problem completely. And we decided this, which is that our competitors were not other smart lighting products. Our competitor was a normal light bulb. If we need to get into the mainstream, we need to make someone buy something instead of buying a normal light bulb. And this, it sounds very basic, but it really informed many decisions that we had to make. And so what we were, and we were working with IKEA, so they're an amazing company, they really think about the home. So instead of working from technology down, we worked from the home up. And this is a philosophy that IKEA, you know, works really, really well with them. They really helped us together, kind of come with this philosophy. They know the home, they know people amazingly well. And so what we started out with was something very simple. The basic product that we launched is this, it's a remote control and a light bulb. And this is a smart light bulb, it's got some stuff in here. But maybe we'll talk about what you can't do with this product. You can't connect to wifi. You can't connect to it with your phone. And all it does is two things really well. It does this, you can change temperature from cold to warm to neutral and you can change brightness. And that might seem incredibly, incredibly basic, which it is. But it offers real value. There's literally no way to do this. And this product costs about 30 euro, which is the cheapest way to get dimming into your home. And especially if you're in a rental apartment where you can't install a dimmer, that's the best way to do that. And also the addition of color is quite useful because what it does is it allows you to change the use of space. You know, if it's in a kitchen you can switch between cooking or maybe studying or working. It allows spaces to change dynamically depending on what your activity is. And so I think what's interesting is it's so boring, that's why it's good. And I've been living with this and I wouldn't go back, I have to say. And that's not just because I worked on the product. And what we kind of call that is smart home without the smartphone. So we looked at these smart products and tried to pull the value out. Tried to pull the little bit of value out and then isolate that so you could have a product without smartphone. And so that's the most basic product. And now I want to talk about, you know, we did do the sort of the standard thing with the app and everything and we tried to address some of the issues there as well. So one of the key things about smart home is that you're designing for the whole family. When you have a typical type of desktop product or phone app or many other products we interact with, they're usually very singular experiences. So I have my app and I work on it and I interact with it, but it's very much about me and the device or the product or the service. It's very one-on-one. Even if I share with other people, it's like two people interacting with their things and then sharing. But with smart home, it's very, very, very different. So you might have the purchaser, the installer could be the father. That's often the case. It's stereotype, but it's often true. And then the user is everybody in the home. So the user could be the grandmother or the children. And let's just think about that. If you have smart lighting and many smart lighting products, you have to use an app. What is your six-year-old supposed to do? They just don't get to use the lighting anymore. It's ridiculous. That's what many of the products do. So what we did is, you know, this remote control we mentioned. So we put the remote control at the center of the experience. And going back to this one, we wanted to avoid this problem. So you can still use your smart phone in our solution, but the remote control is the primary device. So remote control is the idea is that you use that daily and many times during the day. And then we shift actions onto the app that are maybe only used once a day or once a week. So that's the infrequent one. And we call this sort of democratizing smart home. How do we pull it out and give it to the whole family? So in this situation, perhaps the father does the configuration or the one person in the house who's more technical, they use the app, but no one else needs to have the app. And then the app is just used from time to time to set something like vacation mode, where the lights turn on and off while you're away from home. So next, so let's just a little touch on some of the elements we tried to do to answer those questions. I don't think we've solved it by any means. I think we've solved some of those things and we've helped step it one step forward. And looking at other products like Philips Hue, they've also started to come to similar conclusions, it seems. But now I want to talk about what makes it hard to design for. I want to talk about three points. And it's quite unique designing connected products. If any of you have done it, you've probably had similar experiences. One is that the technology is fundamentally different than what you were used to using. We're very used to dealing, you know, most of us work on mobile apps or web apps, and that's my background as a web designer. There we're used to fast CPU, a lot of memory, things that are always on, things that are always connected and incredibly responsive. In connected devices, you often have very, very slow CPU. You have very little memory. You have most of, many things often work on battery. And that means that they're sometimes connected. So a battery operated device like a remote control, it will be asleep, you know, 99% of the day. And it only wakes up when you use it. And so you can't rely on things always being active. And that has very odd consequences. And there's often high latency. So things are not immediately going to enter if you talk to them, especially if you're connecting through the internet, not through Wi-Fi. Typical products often have this configuration, what we're used to. We have an app or a website and it talks to a database. This is a simplification, I know, but the point is still valid, which is most of the logic typically lives in the database, and then this just provides a front end to it. In smart home technology, you often end up with something like this. You have an app which talks to a gateway, which talks to the light bulbs, which talks to remote control. It's already a little bit more complicated. But it also looks like this, because these also talk to each other. It's actually a mesh network and it's designed to be redundant, so any piece can fall out at any time. And I haven't even talked about the cloud aspect, which is also there, which adds another layer of complexity. And what this means is that code can run on many different places, many more places. The logic lives on different places. And as a designer, we're trying to write logic and rules and we are trying to decide what happens if one component is missing or the connection is not there in that moment. The challenge is designers don't know how to do this. I don't really know how to do this. I've worked on a project, and I would say this is still very new. We don't have the tools yet to think about this type of complexity. Developers are also talking about that. They also don't have the tools. And I think this is something quite interesting and very, very challenging. You can't really see this, but this is just talking about the layers of design. So you have UI and visual design, industrial design at the top. And this is very visible to very hidden. And the last one here at the bottom is platform design. And that's working with technical teams to decide the architecture, because the architectural choices have massive impact on the usability. So designers, I expect, are going to need to spend a lot more effort or at least figure out how we can help architects understand the usability of those decisions. And I think what's quite important is that technology is our material. That's the material that we design for. So I think typically designers, maybe not everyone, but many designers have, I would say, a slight arrogance towards technology. You might often hear people say things like, oh, I got the developer to do the thing and it's very cool. And we sort of celebrate that. And I think there's some truth to that. Pushing people out of their comfort zone makes sense. But that doesn't really work with smart home in the same way. The reason is the technologies like WebStack and mobile are incredibly, incredibly mature and they're very robust. With smart home, the technology is still very new and very emerging in that glass. And so you need to treat it very carefully. And so much the way a designer might, if they're making a table out of glass versus metal versus wood, they have a certain reverence for the material that they're using. And I think it's very important to designers that we start to cultivate that reverence for the material. My old boss used to talk about this, he used to say the way he said it was people need to have empathy for the machine. And I think that's quite strong. And it's not about kind of forgetting our design roots at all, but it's just about respecting the material that we're designing with. That doesn't match my timing. So the next is the data is not really reliable. So the device is not always connected. So typically you have action and reaction with a button or something. But in smart home you have this third state in the middle where you have the action, something's happening and there's a reaction. But this third state, you don't know whether things are on or off at all. So it's a bit like Schrodinger's cat. I'll maybe show you examples. It's a hard point to deal with. So you could have a button like this. This is from WeMo. You press the button. You could lock the user out until you know the result and then show it. The problem with this is what happens if it's 30 seconds. If it's 30 seconds before the light comes on then it's a bit difficult. You have a little processor inline and that allows someone to navigate around the app. But the problem here is you could be showing this but the lights are actually already on. So you have a disconnect between what people are seeing and what's actually happening. And that's a big challenge. The alternative is this one which is assume everything's okay and fix it later if not. And so you have different approaches to this and this kind of nitty gritty stuff that you spend 70% of your time on. I would say designing smart home. You don't spend it on the big elaborate things. You spend it on fixing these little things. And that's certainly what took a lot of my time up. And you can't really rely on patterns. So on our remote control we have a little red LED and I got into a lot of arguments with our client about this because it was supposed to be white and then they said a white LED is more expensive apparently. It's going to work. Everyone's going to think red. They're going to think error messages. I sat in a usability test watching many, many people do it. Not a single person cared that it was a red LED. It was a very humbling experience. So you can't rely on some of the things. I think designers are a little bit guilty of we're very aware of patterns and we have to be careful of that not to overemphasize on that. So lastly I just want to wrap up by saying what will it take to become mainstream? And to do that we need to consider the total value proposition and what me and my colleagues did we came up with a very important equation that I want to share with you which is this. So if happiness is greater than money plus pain this is the equation that people are doing in their heads. So smart home isn't right now really balancing this equation. The value is moderate. The cost is moderate and the pain is very, very high. So if we want to address this we need to really fix this equation. So just to recap we want to find the value and maximize it. We need to emphasize the value to users where it's not always clear and pull out the value that's most important. We need to focus on taking the pain out of the product far more than we're used to. And I think largely we need to get better at designing complex systems. I think this is a challenge for smart home connected devices but also for our industry as a whole. If there's one thing that I see is a big challenge for our industry in the coming few years is designing, creating new tools for thinking about these types of complex systems. This applies I think a lot in the enterprise sector as well but things are getting massively, massively more complicated and we don't have the tools or the methods or even the mindset to deal with these. So I expect that this will be a big challenge for us going forward. That's just a little bit of a taster. This is a very complex topic but I hope I've given you a little bit of a taster if you have any questions. You can let me know. Thank you very much.