Smart Home: Interactions

Smart homes have been around for some time. Usually associated with rich owners. Often considered difficult and problematic. The history of smart homes resembles the history of computers a lot. Computers have been around for some time. In the early days usually associated with rich owners. Often considered difficult and problematic.

The computer era had several important milestones: Apple II, 8-bit enthusiast machines (Atari, Commodore, Sinclair), MS-DOS, Windows, MacOS, Web, iOS, Android. Each of the milestones was bringing computers closer to an average human. Generally because the cost of ownership was going down, but also because the human-machine interaction has improved a lot. No more cryptic commands, no more unexpected behavior, improved reliability, predictable actions.

Same story repeats with smart homes. Up till now they have been like the Apple II. Rather expensive, neither really productive nor entertaining, but iconic to their proud owners. It seems now we are entering the enthusiast era. Like Atari, Commodore and Sinclair in the early 80's, toys like Revolv, Zipato, Ninja and others start popping up generating a lot of buzz. Their owners pretend they are solving some serious problems with the smart setups, but really this resembles me the 8-bit era a lot. It was all about exploration, magic, discovery, play. By the way it has been all the same with the iPhone in 2007. Again exploration, magic, discovery, play were the keywords. Of course the most serious people were buying iPhones, but they did not really need them. They wanted to explore, experience and play.

A smart home today is, and will be, about the human - machine interaction. AGAIN. We will get rid of mechanical light switches but we don't want to replace them with in-wall LCD menu displays. We expect the home to be anticipatory and not intrusive. Easy to live in, easy to comprehend, predictable and helpful. The future of smart homes is in the interactions. This is the new UX challenge for the designers. Not the UX of an Android home control app. The UX of a home. How I express my needs and expectations and how it responds, notifies me. It is a whole new game. Very exciting to play!