#05 - Smart home experiences beyond the screen
36:13 Share

Hello and welcome to the future of UX podcast. I am Patricia Reiners, UX/UI designer and creative resident at Adobe. In this episode, I spoke with Bilgi Karan. He is the UX lead at IKEA.

IKEA is a huge European company that designs and sells ready-to-assemble furniture, kitchen appliances and home accessories and among other useful goods, occasionally home services and IoT products. What is so interesting about Birgit's work at IKEA is that he is combining physical and digital experiences with consideration of the context.

And as probably many of you know, I'm super fascinated by everything that happens beyond the screen. So Wilkie shared his tips about how to start designing for all five senses and also what's important designing beyond the screen. We also talked about the future and how he sees the industry today and the importance of voice design and augmented reality. Feel free to share this episode with your friends or colleague if you like it and if it helped you in any way.

But enough talking from my side, let's start with this episode. Hello, I am so happy to have you today. Yeah, thanks for being in the podcast today. So happy to be here. Thanks for inviting.

Awesome. So we have some really interesting questions for you prepared. But before we are going to start with the main questions about smart home and how do you work at IKEA, I would love you to get to know you a little bit better, especially for the audience. And yeah, we are going to start with some shorter questions to get to know you a little bit better. And yeah, please start by introducing yourself and yeah.

Explain us a little bit. What do you do for a living? Okay, what do I do for a living? I'd like to say that I think things through on behalf of users. That's kind of what I do for a living. I am a designer. I'm a design leader and I've been working with UX for a while and I try to identify problems and find solutions to them as I said on behalf of the users and simply

I think it's about minimizing pain and maximizing joy. I come from an industrial design background from the beginning, so that I think gives me an edge when we're talking about thinking about experiences that crisscross between physical and digital all the time. And I work with a smart home at IKEA.

Awesome, that's super interesting because my next question was actually how did you get there? So you already said that your background is industrial design, right? How did you get from industrial design to where you are right now? That has been a very interesting journey. I think the way that I got into industrial design was that I really wanted to think that all design activities are about solving problems.

And that's how I got into industrial design in the first place.

And beyond only thinking about the object, I always try to think about the problem that is supposed to be solved or what is the context of the user rather than the object itself. And a long time I started working at Sony Ericsson, designing a lot of phones and mobile devices and accessories. And there...

Slowly, I realized that I think my focus is much more in the strategic side of things and a little bit more about the experience side of things rather than the object itself. So that kind of evolved into dealing with UX and that was maybe not the word of UX back in the day. And we talked about interactions and we talked about going beyond the shape

So one thing led to the other and I ended up with UX as a profession. Super interesting, thanks for sharing that. So at the moment you're working at IKEA, so what does a typical day in your life look like? A typical day is actually quite a lot of meetings, but I have to say most of them are quite interesting.

I get the chance to give a lot of feedback to the teams that I'm working with and also be a part of a lot of interesting discussions and a lot of interesting decisions. It's a lot about aligning with different people throughout the day and aligning different views so that a lot of the views converge on focusing on the user and trying to understand the problem from the

perspective of the user and trying to invite people to do the same. What are you enjoying the most and the least of your work? You're always talking about meetings. So what do you like the most and the least of your work? Interesting. I think I like...

changing and broadening the vision, maybe with the people that I work with or understanding the really core of the problems that we're dealing with rather than being superficial. And a lot of, maybe compared to a lot of people, I don't necessarily dislike meetings. I think meetings are just...

an opportunity to align views and there is a culture of understanding and a culture of aligning and culture of togetherness at IKEA so it's very natural. But what I don't like too much is maybe wasted resources or wasted time. I would like to be efficient as much as effective as well. Okay.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, especially in the UX area, right?

So you said you're working at IKEA and that's, I think that's super, super interesting because this is like the whole smart home area. It's a lot about the future, how we're going to live in the future, how we're going to designing for our home. So I'm personally very fascinated by those questions and by those areas. So could you talk a little bit about your role there? So what are you doing there? How is your team structured as well?

I'm currently the user experience leader for IKEA Home Smart. And IKEA Home Smart, you can say it is sort of an internal startup within IKEA where we're looking into smart solutions for everyday life that can make your life easier, better. And we're trying to

innovate meaningfully around the smart home and trying to bring it to the, as we call it, the many people. That is basically the people with thin wallets and large dreams.

Love that. And that is a very IKEA thing to say, yes. I think it is a lot about leading the team and leading the discipline for me, where we started forming a team not so long ago around this topic. And we started by hiring a UX researcher

and business designer and now we're expanding into you know ux designers and visual designers and we're hiring quite a lot and expanding i also work with external agencies

So in terms of the team structure, of course, we are not the only UX people at IKEA at large. There are a lot of people working with different topics all the way from e-commerce to internal tools and communication and such. But we are specifically focusing on the smart home. And I have the privilege and the challenge of starting up a completely new team from scratch here in Annhut.

yeah wow that sounds really exciting especially if you um yeah if you look back how ikea started with just like um you have just things for your home and now things are going more into the ux direction so i think it's really um challenging but also super fascinating to build up a new team and thinking about like those smart home systems and especially thinking beyond the screen um different touch points and those kind of things so

So how do you see the future of those things, especially designing for things which are beyond the screen? So which could be another output or could be something which is not like the iPhone screen or the tablet screen we're using right now. Are you already thinking about those things at IKEA at the moment or not so much?

Absolutely. It's a fascinating area. First of all, I think that as the UX industry, we are in a golden era and we should cherish it and we should not forget that it's not going to be like this all the time. I think the last decade

has been amazing for the area of UX and discipline of UX. But as you said, we have been quite focused on pixels on a screen, especially touchable pixels on a screen or clickable. And that has driven us to almost perfectionize this medium.

But as humans, according to some people, we have five senses or according to some people, we have seven or more. I'd like to say that we have to start designing for all. And also we have to design for all kinds of contexts. So visual is only one medium where you can reach people, but we're already seeing the rise of voice and we're, I think,

physical devices are also within my responsibility in this area. And that is really, really important for people to be able to enjoy the advantages of smart home, even if they don't want to use an app or they don't prefer to do so. But also, I think the future is going to bring quite a lot of interesting areas like, you know,

as augmented reality and virtual reality, but also maybe scent design or haptic design, we're already seeing a lot of movement in those.

Yeah, especially sand and haptic design sounds super interesting. And I imagine that we as designers need to do a lot of groundwork because there's not so much resource or resources generally out there, right? So how do you start thinking about those things? Do you start with certain kind of research or how do you even think so in a very far future?

To be honest, we're not necessarily thinking about the modalities themselves. We prefer more to think in terms of problems that need to be solved.

or maybe you can call it the jobs to be done. But at the end of the day, there is a goal for the user to achieve when they're reaching out to a brand or reaching out to finding, trying to find a product for themselves or a service. What we're trying to do is finding the best way of solving that problem using whatever is in our arsenal of tools.

And sometimes maybe the best way of solving it might be something completely intangible or it can be a tangible product. But we are trying not to limit ourselves. But when we move into a new area, especially right now, we are

We started from something very simple, for example, the wireless chargers and moved into smart lighting. And from there, we moved into smart sound and smart blinds. And in the future, there's going to be many more interesting areas. And each of them have some kind of a special need. And they have to be treated in a way that kind of

honors their specialty rather than saying this is a certain information architecture there's on and off and up and down and and we can do this in very symmetrical ways so i'd like to think that we can go a little bit deeper into understanding the needs specifically

I'm wondering how do you align all those things you were just talking about like the lights and sounds and those kind of things how do you make sure that everything is aligned I know that from visual design or from UI design we have design systems kind of but you can't use them for like different touch points right so how do you do how do you do that

That's an interesting question. And it is not that easy because there's no playbook, so to say, for the smart home or for Internet of Things. A lot of the industry is kind of we're charting our path as we move forward. I

I would say we have quite a lot of principles that we have crafted along the way that is helping us out quite a lot. A set of principles is similar to a design system, you can say. But just to give an example, for example, we have a principle called the escalator principle, which has a lot to do with meaningful innovation. Imagine an escalator, even when it fails to work,

it is still a set of stairs. So it still works to a certain degree. So if you imagine a smart light bulb, even if the smart part fails or if you lose the remote control or if you cannot connect to an app anymore, it should still function as a normal bulb for many decades to come. And this is very different from any other piece of technology that you see around you.

And that means working with a lot of legacy. So when we are making decisions, we are thinking about the escalator principle. This is also making decisions around what should work with cloud, what should work locally and so on.

So there is also another thing that we consider all the time, which is addressing needs rather than wants. And this is a very, you know, IKEA brand sort of looking at things. We don't want to dangle technology as a bait in front of people and get them to buy something that later that they might not use.

So it's quite important for us to address their needs first and foremost. I was wondering, you were just talking about the case that you're focusing more on needs than on wants.

and talked about the example with the staircase, which I find super interesting because it makes a lot of sense, especially with light bulbs, for example. If you don't have the app or the remote control, you can still use the switch you have on your wall or something to turn it on and off, right? So, and this makes sense for material things, kind of, but what do you think about voice design? How could we...

integrate something like that in voice design because this is so so abstract are you thinking about like different kind of um yes scenarios for voice design as well um

how to provide different information for different people, for different questions. Of course, of course. I think one of the most interesting topics around voice design is localization, which is to say, this goes beyond translations.

There is of course the aspect of customization, which you do intentionally as the user, but there is also maybe contextualization where the system does it for you and it understands what you're doing or which room you're in, what kind of context you are in.

dealing with and caters accordingly. But at the same time, I think intelligence, of course, comes at a cost. So the more you understand the user's context, the better you can serve them. But that also means like when you talk about needs and wants, I think

Voice interfaces are also quite in their infancy, very much like in the smart home case, where right now there's a lot of technology that kind of pulls you in and says, okay, here is something that you can do. You can play a game or you can, you know,

have the voice assistant bark for you or talk in a funny voice. But these are all focused on the ones. And I think there's nothing wrong with that. Maybe in that context, it just pulls people in so that they get used to the idea. But in the long run, we have to understand what and where voice is really, really useful.

for the people and solve their problems. There, I think that we can actually make something meaningful. Yeah, absolutely. So how do you find those areas? What kind of research do you do or what kind of testing maybe to find those areas?

oh yeah here i have to give a lot of credit to where ikea is coming from i think um uh ikea is about you know making a better everyday life for the many people as we say um so we're quite serious about uh finding out how people live and we have a lot of uh interesting research that that goes into this um one of the things that we do typically are home visits

A lot of the times when IKEA co-workers go somewhere, they try to arrange home visits where they go to a customer's home and they ask them questions, see how they live, what kind of furniture that they might have. For our case, of course, if they're interested in smart home or are there anything that we might help them with in terms of giving them a piece of solution,

using technology and understanding whether we can solve something for them. And when it comes to specialized research within the smart home, we're conducting, I can say, a new piece of research almost every week. In the worst case, every two weeks, we're reaching out to users that we find or they're reaching out to us and we are coming together. We're showing them things that are maybe not...

on the market yet or asking about their opinions about what we have in the store. Since it's quite a large area including both physical and digital devices, we kind of almost have to invent a new research methodology every time we are conducting something. So it never gets boring, I can say.

Okay, yeah, I can imagine that. Yeah, sounds like you're doing a lot of research. And a question to that is actually, how do you share the research with your team? How do you make sure that everyone is aligned on like,

the problems at the moment you're having or the challenges you want to face? That I find it's an ongoing challenge with wherever I worked. I think it's one of the hardest problems to solve. Today what we do is we try to invite as many people into the research as possible and we invite them to, if we're doing it remotely, we invite them to tune in, so to say.

and watch it real time live whatever is happening if it's a diary study we invite them to you know follow it daily this is this actually has proven very powerful once a product developer or an engineer sees the research being done they tend to form an empathy with the end user quite quickly

and understand their pain points. And this is not something easily transferable over a report. In the cases where we shared reports only, we have not seen this empathy being formed just as strongly.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And this is also what I experienced wherever I worked. It was sometimes quite challenging to share the research results. Yeah, but what you just said is really helpful to share them, especially with the product owner or stakeholders, right? So that's definitely really helpful. And

So we just talked about research and the insights you're getting, how people live, how people want to do certain things around their home. So where do you see the biggest opportunities to integrate some kind of emerging technologies? I mean, we already talked about voice design, but what about augmented reality? Where do you see areas where it really makes sense?

When it comes to emerging technology, I mean, I've been working with technology for almost two decades now. And there's one code that I really liked and keep using it, which is just to say, technology is a word for something that does not work yet.

It is usually attributed to Douglas Adams, the author, but I think it came from... Yeah, I mean, I really think that that is the case. We really have to start from the impact. I worked in a lot of the projects where we tried to utilize a certain technology and find problems that that technology can solve.

And this strategy has not been very successful, I would say, in a lot of the cases, in very few cases that has been. Maybe you could find some gold market here or there.

But I feel like starting from the impact might be the key, especially in the world that we live in today. We have to understand the three different globes that we're living in. One is the user, of course. And if you go a little bit outside, that is the society. And then there's the planet. And I take this approach.

because I would like to say that, well, sometimes the technology is not necessarily the answer to solving one or more of these globes, but rather that having a library of technology behind your head and having this library accessible to you as much as possible as you're moving forward as a team is quite important.

So being interested in emerging technologies is much more important than working on a specific technology. Then I would say being brave and experimenting is very important and matching a certain technology to a need.

is one of the best things that design can do. Would this be something you would also say to maybe young designers or people who are really into future topics, into emerging technologies, that they should just try things out and experiment? Or rather...

rather focus on problems and then think about the technology. So what would be your advice for young designers here? I mean, I think it's hard to give advice in this area because everybody has their own challenges. But

I can't tell what we do. We're kind of like doing both of these things at the same time. Usually we say there's things that you should do and there's things that you can do. And there is a very tiny intersection set in between where it is the

you can say it is a meaningful innovation area. And I think we are kind of pursuing both of these questions at the same time from different teams.

Of course, technology or engineering is very interested in what we can do, you know, with the tools that we have, the technology that we have and business and design and some other areas are very interested in what we should do. But there's a lot of overlap in between as well. So we are trying to follow both of these lines at the same time.

trying to ask people what they want and deriving their needs from there, observing what they're doing, how they're going about in their lives currently, what can motivate them and what can change things for the better. But at the same time, trying out different technologies and getting immersed in

in the different experiences also gives us a way of like, oh, here's an interesting opportunity, but not getting married to the opportunity rather than taking that as, okay, we have this in our back pocket now and let's see where it might be useful later on. That's kind of the approach. Okay. Yeah. That sounds like a good approach to focus more on the problem and how to solve specific problems. Right.

So how do you see the industry at the moment for us as UX designers? And how are you assuming everything is going to evolve the next years? What is going to become important in the near future, in the next 10 or 15 years? Although it's difficult to say, I know. But I'm...

I have a feeling that, of course, UX and design in importance is going to increase, but I also feel like it's going to start to dissolve into other things. Just as we're seeing with business design and strategic design to a certain degree, we can see that design is not necessarily a profession that is

described and performed by a certain number of people, it should be distributed as much as possible within an organization.

and within the world also i feel like you know we're moving into a future hopefully where we can have design as part of basic education uh almost from the primary level because i think that it is a great way of solving problems or understanding humans really um there's three things that are coming i should say that are going to shape our future

One of them is, of course, it's kind of my area, which is Internet of Things. And I think that not necessarily Internet of Things, but smart home more likely is going to bring a lot more interesting areas into design. The other one is virtual and augmented reality. And as we say, I mean, you need to be able to design for five senses. So we're going to see a lot more specialized design

designers popping up in this area that's what I foresee and the last but not least is whatever you call it I call it algorithmic design or you can call it design for AI I think it's quite important to understand the ethical side of this and design according to human nature and not missing the the

the meaning part when we're designing for AI and with AI. I think this is also going to be a new emerging area when we're moving forward. That's my hope at least.

So are you at IKEA already thinking about those three areas and trying to hire a designer in those three areas? Or is this just something you personally, from your experience, think will become important?

I can talk maybe on behalf of IKEA, but I can say that there are a lot of people at IKEA experimenting around a lot of different things. I can say that from our perspective, Internet of Things is very important and we are a company that are making things. Of course, those things can change.

um are going to uh exist and they do exist in virtual environments and they will have benefits from algorithmic design and so on so of course ikea is one of those special companies that have a leg in in each of those and there are a lot of experiments going on at the same time

yeah thanks for sharing that um super interesting to see how um yeah so like ikea is going to um yeah see the future in those areas right so um i assume actually that you yeah you always need to be up to date um think about all those new technologies iot especially

Can you recommend any great books or blogs or articles or something you would recommend reading or some source of education for people who would like to go into those topics? Yeah, I think it's surprising, but there is a lot of information out there that is related to Internet of Things and smart homes.

I don't necessarily have a lot of things that I follow all the time, but because the resources are quite fluid these days, especially since the topic is in its infancy. But I try to take a much larger perspective

to understand where, for example, the concept of home is coming from and where we're going when it comes to as humanity. And those things helped me quite a lot in thinking of it in larger context and strategically.

So reading quite a lot, of course, what was going on in the world of smart home. But I don't think that it would help quite a lot to, for example, a new emerging designer or a student, I would say. My advice for them to be

would be being curious about what the future looked like in the past. I would say that is something that I have found very interesting. That is maybe like reading old science fiction. That actually helps me quite a lot. Maybe it's not a direct answer to your question in terms of how I keep myself updated about things that are new.

But things that are new usually are quite fleeting. They don't stay around too long. So reading an old book like 2001 Space Odyssey, which is about the future of the past, you can say, it gives you a lot of insight into how people thought that it would be. Because part of our job is kind of predicting the future.

And it's also, I find it very interesting, one of the very interesting books that I've read recently was the books, I should say, Sapiens and Homo Deus by Yohar Ari. And those two books are talking about where humanity came from and where it's possibly going. And there's even a third book that is a continuation of this.

These actually give you a very good sense of what humanity itself is about and what life itself is about. I think just by opening

Opening up the internet, you can find a lot about current technologies and where things are going from any blog or anything that you come across. But I think finding gems like this are maybe more interesting for me.

Great. I really love that you recommend non-UX books or resources, but more about like the human being, especially for us as UX designers. It's awesome to understand the world and the people a little bit better. So yeah, really great resources, great books to check out. I think for almost everyone, but especially for UX or product designers. Yeah, really great advice. Thank you for that. So if people want to...

follow you want to find you somewhere um are you on any social networks

I am. People can reach me through Twitter if they want to, although I'm not very active, but I follow quite a lot of people and I'm also active on Medium and one of my New Year's resolutions is to write more and read even more. So they can definitely reach me through those two places.

and uh you know i'm as as everybody else i'm on linkedin as well so awesome so i'm going to link um all your social uh channels you just mentioned in the show notes so people can find you reach out to you and check what you're doing um yeah so um do you have any last words something you want to share otherwise um

Thank you. Thank you very much for inviting me. I just wanted to say that, uh, for, for any young designers, um, or designers to be listening to us, uh, I'd like to say, um,

One thing that I learned quite late in life is that reading and writing are very underrated skills, I should say, for a designer. And they should definitely be brave and curious and try to immerse themselves into a lot of different experiences as much as possible. But above all, think about the impact that they're making to the world. Yeah.

Wow, really great last words. Thank you for sharing that. I think that's really good advice. Yeah, for all the listeners out there. Thanks for sharing that.

So thank you so much for taking the time for the interview and the podcast. I think we are all really appreciating that. Yeah. Thank you so much for your support. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this wonderful episode. Let me know if you have any feedback or recommendations. And if you like this episode, feel free to share it with your friends or your colleagues.

I am always super happy about ratings or reviews on iTunes, so I would really appreciate that. Thanks for listening and hear you in the future.