6: Smart Home 🏠 User Experience - Training
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The best introduction to this episode might come from comedian Brian Regan. I joined a health club. I went one time. I got into this one thing. I put my arms and my legs where I thought they were supposed to go, and I just start moving stuff around.

This guy comes up, "Hey buddy, would you mind getting out of the painter's scaffolding?" I'm sorry. Welcome to another episode of ID8 and the second installment in our three-part series on the connected home. This week, Rob's breaking down a part of the process that could intimidate anyone, and it's the first step. That can't be intentional, right? So what have experienced designers in other industries done to address the setup process?

Rob, what do you think?

You could probably think about the experience of setting up some smart device and think to yourself as a designer of that thing, well, the setup process is only one time, so I'm not going to really think too much about that or focus too much about that. Yeah. But if the process of the setup never happens or is too difficult for a person to get done, it's not going to go good, and they're not going to... First impressions. Yeah, first impression makes all the difference, right? Yeah.

We want love at first sight. You know, there's basically two experiences that people have. Some people have really good experiences and they really do. They set the thing up in just a few minutes.

and it immediately becomes a connection that they have an emotional response to. - So I was doing some comparison shopping on Amazon yesterday for an Echo, and I read some of the reviews. - This is my sister-in-law, Jana. She reached out after the last episode. - So one user had said he purchased

purchased it for his brother who was paralyzed and his brother really relied on it, ended up loving it because he could play games with just his voice, check the weather, set an alarm, all of that without having to ask someone else to do it for him. Another lady said when her cat died, she really appreciated having it around. It was like having someone's

So I mean something went well there, right? These people got past Go and they collected their 200. The other, the flip side to that coin though is the bad experience.

And, oh my goodness, the ways that this can go wrong, right? For this episode, a couple weeks ago, I ordered a GE Easy In-Wall Smart Dimmer. Oh, man. Tell me all about how smart and how easy it was. Let's just say...

If this were Tinder, I'd be swiping left. Is that the right way? I don't even know which way. I don't actually know. I hope that's the bad way. Got in the mail today my GE in wall easy smart dimmer.

- Let's pop this guy, we'll see what it's all about. - So I got the thing in the mail, I'm excited. I take out the instruction manual. It should be easy, right? I pulled the plate off. First thing I notice is that the wiring doesn't match the one diagram that comes with the dimmer. And then secondly, I noticed that the switch doesn't even fit in the wall. Let's head out to the Home Depot, see if we can find the missing components to install this switch.

So off to Home Depot, I asked one of their electricians like how would I wire this up describing it to him. You got the line and the load but you don't have the neutral or the ground.

- So that bare wire is not... - The bare wire is a ground. - But it might not be... - And he's all like, "Well, I'll connect the bare wire to the white wire, and then the white wire to the black wire," and all this stuff. And I bought an extra switch box to make sure that the switch fits. Get home, start putting it together.

Not only does the switch box not fit in the wall cavity, but also the wiring doesn't make the switch work. So now I'm taking the old metal switch box and I'm grinding it down with a grinder just to get the switch to fit in there, get it all together. Still doesn't work. Tried several variations of the wiring, Googling for days. Nothing could make that thing work. So...

Back to Amazon I went and now I'm left with a bad taste in my mouth about this easy smart dimmer. Well, what you didn't read, what you don't understand is that it would have been smart and would have been easy if you were smart and if you had done it 50 times before.

Fair enough. Yes. Yes. If I had been a journeyman electrician, this would be super easy. Super easy, right? That's in the fine print, clearly. Yes, right. There's several asterisks there that get you there. So two sides of the same coin.

Some people have great experience. What happens? Their brand is elevated. They sell more products because the experience is good for people. The people that make the thing, they end up making more money. In the other instance, they didn't just not sell stuff. They've wasted time.

time, money, effort, all the stuff on a device that someone ends up returning because it's so poorly thought out from the beginning, from the setup process. And oh man, doesn't that sound a lot like going to the gym? Girl, when I tried to go to the gym by myself, I was terrified of the weight room. This is Vlogger, it's Donika.

Deadly scared. Just walking past it gave me a feeling in the pit of my stomach. That's right. But like, okay, so think about the gym experience that a typical person has. Not a muscle head, but someone who probably hasn't worked out in a while. They started feeling a little chunky. Maybe you're eating too many pints of ice cream at night every night. I've been there. We've all been there. Yeah.

So what do you do? I'll tell you what you do. You go to the first gym that your friend goes to or that's close to your house. You sign up and you think to yourself, that's all you got to do, right? All you got to do is get your membership going and you're going to get so sweet. In actuality, what happens is you go to that gym for the first time and...

You're dumbfounded. Right? There's the million machines that you don't remember how they're supposed to work with plates and pins and security straps and muscle heads in the corner. Your experience there is one of feeling overwhelmed, intimidated,

you're probably just gonna leave that piece and go snap up a shake at McDonald's, right? It's an overwhelming experience the first time you go into a place like that. - That is absolutely true.

In the 50s, there were these two psychologists, one British, one American, and they did a series of studies that culminated in what we refer to today as Hick's Law, which states that the more choices you have, the slower...

you will be at making a decision. And in many cases, that point of friction leads to making no decision at all. When you're at the gym, you're exactly right. That's how I feel every time I go to the gym. There's all these things. What do I do? Eh, nothing, I guess.

Yeah, it's just like, it's like, that's a nice, a nice principle to draw upon. It's just common sense really though, right? Like you give somebody a bunch of options and what do they do? They just, they, they can't figure out what to do. And even if they do make a decision, they feel like they didn't make the right one. Right. And that's, that's how I usually feel in the gym. I'm like in a machine thinking to myself, this is probably not the right way to do this. Right.

I hope no one's watching me. Please don't look at me. Attractive female in the corner. Right? So gyms know this too. They understand that it's intimidating for first time goers. So gyms have tried to alleviate the trouble for people who are just getting going by providing them with guidance in the form of a trainer. And having a trainer with you kind of takes that away because first

They are guiding you. They give you like bite-sized things to do and they show you how to do them properly so that you feel like you're doing something of benefit. Like that's going to actually get you results. Okay, I like that. So what does that mean for the smart home? What are we talking about here? Well, I think we can glean a lot of principles from that trainer experience. How do we guide people to

Helping them to understand what's available for their home. How do we guide people in understanding how their home works? How to configure this stuff for themselves?

What does a trainer do when you first get going at a gym? Well, they ask you a bunch of questions, right? What are you doing right now physically? Do you just sit out all day or do you have, right? Right. They want to know about what's your current physical status? What's your current diet like? What's your goals? Are you trying to be Schwarzenegger? Are you just trying to like kind of get fit?

fit. We've got some opposing goals there, H. Goals are different from reality. That's why they're goals. Right. But the trainer finds out what your current state is.

And what you want to do, right? That's like fundamentally, that's what they're trying to do. Yeah, exactly. In the industry with smart home, it would be nice if instead of just giving me all of the individual parts to make a smart home and say, go forth and figure out how to use this stuff. Let's say, well, what's the current state of your home?

I want a service that I can just like answer some questions about my home and it just spits out a list of all of the stuff that I can put in my home. Not my neighbor's home, not the home in Canada, not the home in Mexico. My home, the one that I live in, right? I don't care if it's compatible with other stuff. I want to know if it's compatible with my home, you know? That's right. And so give me like...

An ability to tell you what's in my home and then you be smart about it and tell me what's what's available for it And let me buy that one click boom I get all the stuff in the mail in a few days and it gives me an appropriate list of instructions on how to get going and how to set up the stuff I want that I want that that's what I'm saying and

Right? I think if you wanted to go like a step further and talk about the configuration, which I still consider a part of the setup process, right? Because plugging the thing in is not the same as figuring out how it works within an automated system. And I think that that's like a place where a lot of people get stuck. They can't figure out how that would work or it seems overwhelming for them to get started on.

So give me some guidance and show me the way, right? Like when I start adding light bulbs and stuff, suggest to me that when I go to sleep at night, you just turn off those lights because I don't sleep with the lights on like an animal. Like there's certain things, there's certain things that everyone does or a vast majority of people do that you can just make some pretty broad assumptions on and be smart. The moniker in all these devices is smart.

But, you know, it always means that you have to be smart to use it. Give us some ideas there, right? And then as you add more devices, you add like a lock or something to your door. You can imagine like that getting connected back to the hub and the hub says like, hey, I noticed that you have a lock and

Do you want us to make sure that that lock is activated when you activate your goodnight scene? Right? Just being smart, knowing what's there and taking the proper initiative, providing some sort of guidance for everyone, just in the same way that when a trainer guides a person that's new, ultimately, what do they do? They let, they let the person go and,

And now they're in that gym intimidating other people, right? Because now they have the experience, but it takes that slow churn to get to where you can be proficient enough to do it on your own. And it has to start with guidance, though. You're never going to get there unless you get that hand-holding at the beginning.

Man, you've given me new impetus to go out and sign up for the gym and hire a personal trainer. Nah, it's too hard. Give up. Just accept your body type. Yeah. Body positivity. Swipe right.

Well, 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 Wyze cams to add to your own connected home. Just send us your username so we know you are via Twitter, DM at ID8 team or email us at info at ID8 dot team. We look forward to hearing from you. And as always, thanks for hanging out. Next time on ID8.

Set the temperature in the house to 70 degrees. Okay, I set the thermostat to 70 degrees Fahrenheit. It's a constant tug of war between competing systems that do similar functions. And so your brain is constantly choosing which faculty wins. Ask my buddy to alert my friend to get me off of this floor.