Time, Comfort, and Authentic Human Connection Are Smart Ideas

The evening meal is my favorite time of day. My family and I sit down together and talk about everything from the kids’ day at school to what’s going on in the world. Often, questions arise about a fact, stat, or piece of trivia. Lately, we’ve been enjoying the company of some new dinner guests who have the answers to all our questions – Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa.

When Gianfranco Lanci, Lenovo’s Chief Operating Officer, released his tech predictions for 2019, I noted his top prediction was that smart devices would focus on meeting core human needs. He based his prediction on recent research from our user experience team, who have seen that saving time, increasing comfort, and enabling authentic human connection is what people value most in their technology.  Other themes like convenience, wellbeing, and healthy living are also key. Further, we’ve learned that people expect smart home devices to help them with things that matter in their daily lives, addressing “the broad canvas of their needs… in a sensitive, personalized, and proactive way” (Gartner 2018).  

Changing the way we live

In a very short period of time, connected and smart devices have radically changed our home environments – after all, the top devices today in the marketplace weren’t even on shelves a few years ago. While we’re still in the early phases of both innovation and user adoption, Smart Home devices are helping to simplify our lives and make us more productive.

I can point to clear examples of the value smart home devices can provide. It’s interesting how quickly these devices have become a normal part of our daily lives. Asking, “Hey Google, what’s the weather,” or “read me the news headlines” is just something we do now.

But we know that users want more. And there are a number of challenges to meet before we realize the true potential of Smart Home devices. We’re still at the start of the journey towards truly intelligent homes. Many Smart Home devices today still have point devices, meaning they have to be set up via smartphones, tablets, and PCs, rather than standing on their own.

While there are some things these devices do really well, to meet core human needs they still need to improve. If you’ve seen the movie Iron Man, it provides a glimpse of what I believe we will get to: Where your AI assistants and smart devices actually know you, like J.A.R.V.I.S. knows Tony Stark.

Users have broad expectations of Smart Home devices and how they should fit into their lives. In addition to saving time, increasing comfort and staying connected, users expect the devices to help them with things that matter. They want their devices to help them achieve goals or change behaviors; they want their experiences to be personalized and customized. That’s how you get assistants and devices like Peloton and FitBit. 

Choices, choices, choices

We know many potential Smart Home consumers are confused and daunted by the array of choices. If you go online to buy a smart speaker and there are ten available, where do you even start? How do you know which will best meet your needs?

While customers like the prospect of making their day-to-day tasks simpler and more convenient, they can be overwhelmed by the number of choices and seeming complexity of setting up and using Smart Home devices. We’re focusing on Smart Home solutions that are easy to deploy, maintain, and use. Self-repairing and self-healing are big goals for devices in the future.

There’s also the problem of compatibility and interoperability. Many smart devices don’t talk to each other, and that’s frustrating for users. There’s the Amazon Alexa ecosystem, the Google Assistant ecosystem, the Apple ecosystem, and more.

We’re starting to see some initiatives, like Microsoft and Amazon having Cortana and Alexa talk to each other, or hub speakers that have both Google Assistant and Alexa, but broadly it’s still a user pain point for a number of customers feeling pressure to pick an ecosystem, and understand how various devices work together. While there are hubs out there that try to simplify this, it’s not easy for the end user who wants to be able to connect all these different devices themselves.

Right now, we’re focused on learning from users who are taking the plunge and listening to customers’ feedback on our own products, whether by using big data text analytics on forum conversations, speaking with our Insights Panels, or talking with Smart Home industry experts to understand user frustrations and delights. Our product teams are using these insights to address and improve user experience around the whole Smart Home category.

Here is a sneak peek at what our UX team is studying:

• Smart home stories – elevating user voices on experiences in tech-enriched homes
• UX concepts to meaningfully improve domestic technology, in terms of new functionality and integration
• Solutions that help people organize, plan, and gain insights on their home lives and activities
• Thinking beyond screens – exploring new ways to surface essential information in and around the home, blending in better with the look and feel of all homes
• The potential turbocharging impacts of new technologies, like richer AI-assistance, 5G implications, and the possibilities inherent in AR and VR

In the future, Smart Home experiences will be more seamless and better integrated with each other. Devices will have clear value propositions, like the Lenovo Smart Display and the Lenovo Smart Clock. There will be honesty and transparency in terms of security and privacy. 

To me, the future is devices that provide even more personalized, tailored, and helpful functionality at home. Smart home devices will know you better and respond more adeptly to your needs in real time.

Overall, in the move towards ‘intelligent transformation’ and smarter technology for all, our Smart Home devices must keep the most important element – the human – at the forefront. Carley Knobloch says, “Thoughtful is the new smart”. I like that. These Smart Home devices are solutions, not merely products; as we create them, sell them, and use them, we must be mindful of the real problems they’re aimed at, and the ways they can help us grow.

Our quest is to innovate with purpose, building technology that allows us to be much more human, improving how we interact with our devices and each other. What really matters is that we design products that save time, create comfort, enable authentic human connections and, in turn, make people’s lives better.