How to design smart Home Products: Do not ask users to interact with you

Viva Labs, CEO and co-founder of the smart home product start-up company, Henrik-Hollom (Henrik Holen) recently wrote that the design of a satisfactory smart home product should comply with four principles: no user interaction, user ownership, improved products and sharing of users.

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Want to make a lot of money? Design a dishwasher that you can empty your own.

It's easy to imitate smart home products on the market, but really good products-products that really solve real problems for consumers-can squeeze people out of your company's door.

The quality of a good product is that it can reduce carbon emissions, make people feel safe and easy to use, and do not require people to do too much.

Unfortunately, most smart home products are not up to these requirements, except for a few products. Instead, manufacturers tend to think that users need a platform to do their own work, rather than a product that can improve their lives. Their solution is proposed by the engineers, but also for the engineers, it often requires the user has a very high technical enthusiasm and level. The average user may only have exclaiming.

In Viva Labs, we spent several years studying how to design smart home products that can be easily accessible to ordinary users. Through countless times of communication with home users and improvements based on their feedback, we understand how popular smart home products should be designed and how consumers want them to work. Here are four principles we have mastered.

1. Do not ask users to interact with smart home products.

If you have a background in developing a network or application, then you may be accustomed to interacting with your product users. They will selectively use the features you provide and engage in positive interactions with you.

However, when it comes to smart home products, this interaction is significantly less.

When do you use the lamp? When you turn on the lamp switch, or when you are going to read under the lamp? Active interaction is only a small part of the process of using smart home products. Most of the time, they will work behind the scenes to help us start a comfortable life rather than attract our attention.

Even those who install smart home products rarely have meaningful interactions with these products. Ordinary users do not even know their existence at ordinary times. Children, guests, or family pets may not be aware of their existence when using smart home products. Nevertheless, smart home products still need to play its part.

2. This is the user's world, not your world.

Because your users don't realize they're using your product, you don't expect them to follow the rules you set. In your application, you can set your own rules. However, in the user's home, users are the rule makers. They will not change the habits they have developed over the years to accommodate your views.

Your product to meet the needs and habits of users, otherwise it will not be able to follow the user's preferences to deal with things, and then become worthless in the eyes of users.

3. Improve existing products rather than changing user habits.

One of the main reasons why your smart home products have not been successful so far is that they are built for people who love technology. Because these people are early adopters, they are more willing to try new things and more tolerant of product flaws. Manufacturers tend to tend to focus on such groups, but doing so will make it impossible for them to extend their product audiences from early adopters to the mass market.

Not all things need to be connected to the Internet. Some things that do not surf the internet are not worthless. For example, the lighting switch works well and you can't change the way people use it.

To get into the mass market, you have to redesign and improve the product, not replace it. To win users, you have to focus on creating truly valuable services and products.

Nest is a very popular incubator with learning function, which has recently been acquired by Google (Weibo). It redesigned and improved the thermostat and did a pretty good job. Traditional "smart" incubators add a lot of functionality, you can design programs, plan, and choose patterns, but they do not improve the actual experience of the incubator.

What Nest does is try to improve the existing incubator experience and make the product as comfortable and economical as possible without changing the user's habits.

4. Automatic user sharing problem solving.

In the use of smart home products, people want less hands and less brain. If you can help them do that, then you find the key to success. Your smart home products must be able to help users clean up the little things that annoy them in their daily lives and repeat the tedious things.

For those of US Viva Labs, this means "intelligent automation". When I leave the house, the radiator will automatically turn off, the lights will go off automatically, and the burglar alarms will automatically open. All these things that I had to remember before, are now automatically done by intelligent products. In the busy life, these small things can help users worry is not small, we believe that this is the future of smart home.

In the next year or two, most of us will have the opportunity to make our home smarter. Apple, Google, Samsung and your local cable company will be competing for a platform to support your daily life. Whether they succeed will depend on their ability to truly understand our daily lives.

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)