5: Smart Home 🏠 User Experience - Automation
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Did you guys see that video of that Italian grandma and her kids got her a Google Home? You have to say, hey, Google, or okay, Google. Hey, Google. Okay, Google. What's the weather? What's the weather, ask.

What the weather? You wanna know what is the weather? Tomorrow. In Flagler Beach tomorrow, there will be showers with a high of 65 and a low of 56. It's really so good. My question is, if a digital assistant really is an assistant,

And why do I have to be so smart to use it? Ooh. Nailed it. Nailed it. Wow. Welcome to another episode of ID8. If you've ever asked that question, you're going to love these next few episodes because the team's taking a deep dive into the experience of the connected home. We've got Rob. Hello, everyone. He's going to walk us through setup.

And then there's Aaron. Hello. Who's going to show us how smart devices could be smarter by taking cues from the human brain. This week, though, we're talking to industry leaders who understand why we feel so overwhelmed by the options. And the answer is political in a way you might not expect.

Five years ago or so, I was working with this small consultant group and we were doing UX for a lot of startups. One of these startups had this very grand utopian vision for the future of the connected home where all the things in your house would be smart. So eventually they adopted the name SmartThings.

And when you're part of a small startup like that, you wear a lot of hats. One of the responsibilities I had was to produce this Kickstarter video so we could make some money for the next round of development. And let me play you a little excerpt of this Kickstarter video because I think it gives you a sense for what the vision of the company was at the time.

Wouldn't it be smart if your bed knew when you got up so that it could turn on the lights, open the shades, and start the coffee pot? I think this is probably still what we all dream of when we're on our way to Best Buy. Wouldn't it be smart if your house knew when no one was home and could secure itself and tune itself to save energy? But in reality, when we get to the store and we're looking at just this sea of devices...

it's a little bit more complicated than we think, right? Like, does this ring work with my Alexa? Does my Alexa work with my Nest? Is this switch Zigbee or Z-Wave? You know, we have to ask, why are these consumer electronics so confusing? So we got to speak with a few people in this space. One of them was my friend Ben Edwards. He's one of the founders of SmartThings.

And you know, SmartThings was eventually acquired by Samsung and Ben moved on to work with a company called Misty Robotics. I don't know if you remember Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons. - Rosie! - Coming, sir.

But Misty Robotics has a kind of a similar vision of the future. So they make these kind of cool kits if you want to start developing the robots of the future. One of the first things that people are going to do as they're developing the Misty platform would be to connect it to their home automation platforms.

I think that there's some aspects of the value proposition that we talked about at SmartThings that transfer over into a world of robotics. So of course, we were excited to talk to Ben and get his input on this topic.

And then there was Wyzecam, which is this Wi-Fi enabled home monitoring camera that just kind of exploded on the market this fall. We had a chance to sit down with Alana Fishman, who founded Wyzecam with four of her colleagues. And we actually met when we were working at Amazon a few years ago. But we started getting interested in the smart home space basically because we saw it as a way to bring interesting technology that could be really useful to people's lives.

And we saw that a lot of people weren't having access to that technology for a number of different reasons. And so our goal is to democratize technology, basically. And let's hone in on that phrase for just a second. Democratize technology. What does that mean to you? Well, democracy is really working great right now. So...

Everybody's loving the way that's turning out. So does it mean to not function well together as a whole? Yeah. I mean, I think, I think in, you know, in terms of like a democratization of, of technology, just making it, making it readily available to, to everybody, to every, to every person. That's what I think of when I think of that term. Yeah. Both of those are accurate assessments for different reasons, right? Yeah.

But usually when we hear democracy, we think of a form of government where people have, in theory, a voice in what happens. And there's a reason why democracy appeals to so many people, right? Because even if you have the most well-meaning dictator to rule,

he'll likely be limited by his one narrow perspective on things, and that perspective is probably so different from the perspective of his subjects. So even when he tries to make good decisions for the people, he'll likely misunderstand their real needs. - Your subject had no bread! Do you know what she said?

Let them eat cake. Yeah. Well, there was a president in the past, maybe George Bush Senior, who in a debate or something, he didn't know how much a gallon of milk costs or something. He just was very disconnected from real life prices on things.

And so, you know, they use that against him in like political sense to say that he's out of touch with the people. - Don't you judge me. You're the selfish one. You're the one who charged his own brother for a Bluth frozen banana. I mean, it's one banana, Michael. What could it cost? $10? - Yes! - You never aren't yourself. - Yes! That's even better.

Yeah. You know, and it's funny, but companies are vulnerable to this same thing, this same principle. They can spend years in a vacuum, maybe decades developing this product. And then millions of dollars later, they bring it to market. And it turns out that no one wants it because they overlooked something huge and didn't understand what people really wanted.

I'm sure we could all think of an example. - Yeah. - The Segway. - What Henry Ford did in the last century for rural America,

is what this device will do in the next century for city dwellers all over this country and all over the planet. Well, I mean, I've got my garage is just filled with segues right now. But yeah, they unveiled this as the thing that was going to change everyone's lives and they were ready to go with them. They put all that, they built this factory and everything.

who knows how many millions of dollars into development of it, and then it became a joke. Nobody really wanted to ride around on this ridiculous scooter. Except for Paul Blart, Mall Cop, of course. And Joe Bluth. Well, and also, how would we ever get tours of certain cities without Segways? Yeah.

We'd have no way around. So for obvious reasons, and to varying degrees, but especially in technology, most product makers share the same general ideals as these democratic governments. People like Ben and Alana, they admit, like, we're never going to be done with this product. Let's just put the ideas out there and let people decide the future of these things with their purchase power and their feedback.

But just like any government, there are going to be benefits and there are going to be drawbacks to this approach. So we should probably be aware of both of these things, right? What do you want to focus on first? I'm feeling rather positive today. So let's start there.

Okay. Yeah. Well, the positive, obviously, is that we have more options. Did you know that today there are actually more connected devices on the Internet than there are people? Yeah. And the best way to get to that point is by being open. So at SmartThings, there was very much that open community, the concept of share early and share often. Yeah.

And I think it's that same cultural belief system that drew Ben to Misty. Really what we're doing, very similar to SmartThings, is we're opening it up and saying, "We don't know what people want to use this for. We were interested to see it. We're interested to find out. And so we're going to give you the tools

that you can have to make what you find useful in your life. - So long story short, when people like Alana talk about the democratization of technology, that's what they're talking about. - We get great ideas when we go out and ask our users how they use our camera and what we can do to make it better. - So can't you just hire someone to just think of all those scenarios beforehand? Just hire a smart person and put it all together?

Oh yeah, for sure. You want to put your best foot forward. You have to try. You don't want to sell people on doing all your work for you. But what we've found is that there's a balance. Even the best feature can improve. Ilana actually gave us some examples from Wisecam. One of the things that we heard a lot from customers who were using the share feature

of our camera much more than we were expecting. You know, it's pretty common if you have it in your home that you might want to share it with a partner or a loved one that lives in the home with you. And so that we were expecting, but we got feedback from people that wanted to, for example, be able to share their camera only during certain hours with a babysitter, someone that was coming in to watch their children.

And so there's a lot of things like that that we just hadn't really thought of. So by releasing this product early, they could get feedback and develop exactly what people wanted instead of making those determinations on their own. Yeah. In a vacuum. I liked hearing her talk about that because she had a nice feel, I think, for what the potential of this thing and here's some options for it. But ultimately, they realized that people were using it in certain ways and adjusted to that appropriately.

Yeah. So I guess to sum up, the democratization of technology means that we get choices and we can use those choices to change the future of the industry. We have a voice. That's kind of cool. But just like Aaron, you noted about government, that choice does come at a price. And in this case, the price is that we just have a bunch of iron and clay that doesn't necessarily work together anymore.

And the burden is on us to some extent to figure out how we can just use this stuff. It's still a mess of different radio types and signals. There's still not any sort of like shaking out of the industry where, oh, this is totally going to win or everything's going to be Wi-Fi. And so I think that there's still got to be more patience as they continue to try to connect more and more things. There's this promise of what smart home technology in particular can do. And there's a gap between that promise.

promise and the actual experience for most people. And I think people that are super technical love to get features early and play with them versus somebody that just wants to buy the baby cam and it needs to work for them. And in my opinion, the worst kind of technology is a technology that almost works but doesn't. If it doesn't work, you're done with it. But things that just fail sometimes but not all the time.

That's a really hard place to be. The trust factor is super key and it takes dozens and dozens of times to build the trust, but only one time of it failing to completely obliterate the trust that you have in a product like this. And there's a scale to that. If your smart lock doesn't let you in and you're locked out and

you know, January in Minnesota, you're going to really be angry about that. If, you know, if your light in the bathroom doesn't come on when you want it to, and you have to reach over and flip the switch, like probably not the worst thing, but IOT and smart Homer, you know, they're going through their little trough of disillusionment. So I don't know, guys, what do you think, you know, when you have something that's supposed to be one thing for everyone, you know,

everyone has the potential to be kind of disillusioned. So how do you make it a success? Yeah. I mean, I think part of it is standardization of certain things. It's not that Alexa, Google, or Apple needs to win. It's just that if everything can, can work with all three. Right. And I think the solution is patience. When I think about,

a lot of technology it we're standing on the shoulders of audiophiles technophiles

People who care so much that they want to get these partially working, expensive things. Think about people who went from tapes to CDs. It didn't just roll out and everyone adopted it. It took people to replace their collections and for the price to come down and for there to be a big enough market to keep making these expensive CD players. And eventually they replaced...

tapes, right? And it's impossible to just get it right out of the gate. And like what these guys are doing, they're trying to get people to play with it, let those people who are really passionate about it, work with it. And then over time, it's just standard. People don't even realize all that went into it becoming part of everyday life. It's funny. We shared a lot of stages early on at like conferences and things with

Tony Fidel of Nest and like you know other kind of leaders in bringing you know sort of the smart home technologies to the mainstream and they were saying you know we're still 10 years away from mass adoption of these technologies for when like you know you can go to like a

a regular person, a non-techno enthusiast, and they'll be like, oh yeah, I've got some automated things going on in my house. And we were kind of like, no, 10 years. Tony's just being pessimistic for the headlines or whatever. But as it turns out, he was probably right on. I think we are just much further away than we thought. So whether we're a project manager or a designer or the dictator of a regime or anything,

an elementary school teacher, it turns out we have some common challenges. How do we empower adventurers, makers, creators, and developers to shape the future without alienating everyone that relies on stability? Our interviewees gave us four key actionable lessons. So here they are.

Lesson number one, focus on one thing at a time. I would say really lean towards the market that you're going to and go all in into it. I think we...

We stepped back from it at SmartThings a little bit. We didn't put our full resources that we could have into developer relations, developing that community. We have a pretty involved group of beta testers, so we're able to leverage people that are really technical and really want to dig into things and test things and help us find the bugs.

So we'll release things to that group early and get feedback and improvements from them. And once we've really vetted it with them, then we'll push things out to the more general public.

We're a relatively small team, so it's a balance for us of new product development while continuing to support and enhance existing products. I often would say, you know, I think the perfect size for a company is somewhere between 15 and 30. We grew from...

like 70 at time of acquisition to about 250 in like a year. And that was just like way too fast. SmartThings after the Kickstarter campaign, they had like a dual gaze where they were looking in two different directions. And then of course, once you're owned by a company like Samsung, I think it did get muddied and we kind of went away from our original target market. So...

Lesson number three, have a realistic plan. So I think the risk is that it takes a long time and we're a venture backed entity and that our investors want return sooner rather than later. That's kind of the

the window that you put yourself in when you take venture money. And I think in SmartThings history, at the early stages, we had revenue, but we had, you know, much bigger expenses. And, you know, like, I think that that hurts a company in the early stages because they're always chasing that next round of financing. And so I think that, yeah, that is some of the lessons that

I'm taking from SmartThings to this new venture. If we can build sustainability in sooner rather than later, we don't have to be at the mercy of investors.

And listen number four, keep your ear to the ground. It's interesting. I think the biggest thing for us is developing a relationship with our customers and really viewing them as our friends and as our partners and really starting from a place of how would I design this for my friend or how would I price this for my friend? We have a very engaged community. We have a very active social media following and we're on all the major platforms. And we have someone solely dedicated to monitoring and engaging on those platforms.

We have a very close relationship between our product team and our customer support teams. Customer support is a big area for us. We also do a lot of customer surveys. And then we do have a beta community that we work with. We have a UX person who does more in-depth usability studies. So we try and hit all the different bases because there's a lot of things that a user may not even be able to articulate. Our hope is that we can really develop products that really delight people because we anticipate what

what they might like because we know them so well. Yeah, I love that when you're talking to your beta testing group or your user testing group and you learn something that you really didn't anticipate, right? And I love that idea of measuring your success in the amount of times that you're wrong, not in the amount of times that you're right. It's really difficult for companies to beta test companies.

Maybe they feel dirty putting this unfinished product out there, but that ends up turning into this really complicated, giant product that just gets dumped out there and they put all that money into it. And then you're just in maintenance mode and you can only change little things.

And we work really hard to try to convince people to just get something out there. And that's a really hard thing to do. I mean, it's funny. I went back recently and looked at the Kickstarter video that you created for SmartThings and

I don't know, there might be some difference in how we weight various elements of it, but it was very spot on for what I still think that they're moving towards and want to build. We've kind of envisioned many of the scenarios and they're only going to start

becoming more and more possible as these things are all connected. People mock all the connected things like connected refrigerator, connected blender and vacuum and all these things. And it is mockable in its current state because we can't come up with the use cases yet. But once you have a palette of options out there as a maker or as an integrator, you're going to start to see like,

"Alright, well maybe that isn't so crazy. Maybe I could like, you know, connect this and that and the other thing and make a scenario that hasn't been thought of before." So that's the spirit in which this industry was built. And even though it's confusing for now, I think that context can help us be patient, like Aaron said. Because really, technologists and politicians both agree. Democracy is a little bit messy sometimes.

Well, we'd like to thank Ben and Alana for sharing their insights with us this week. And as always, we're very interested in your insights as well. As a burgeoning podcast, we'd love your feedback. So all this month, leave us a review on iTunes or Google Play, and you'll automatically be entered to win one of two Wisecams to add to your own connected home. Just send us your username so we know who you are via Twitter DM at ID8 team or email info at ID8.team. We look forward to hearing from you. And as always, thanks for hanging out.

Next time on ideate. Got in the mail today my GE in wall easy smart dimmer I would tie the white

and the ground to the bare wire. - Okay, download our firmware. Now go buy a Raspberry Pi. - Open up terminal on your computer. - Important update and must restart. - You just started. - It'll be ready again shortly.