This is especially true today when consumer tech and business computing are often one and the same. It seems quaint, in this world of smartphones, that BYOD was once a topic of hot debate.
I’m not sure that type of convergence is happening with IoT, though. At least not yet.
Solutions in search of problems
Taylor Lorenz wrote about how “CES was full of useless robots and machines that don’t work.” Her observations pretty much line up with my overall take on smart home devices — so many are solutions in search of problems.
I have a few connected monitoring devices of various sorts in my house. They let me virtually drop in when I’m traveling, which provides some level of comfort.
For the most part, though, smart home gadgetry is aimed at solving problems most of us don’t actually have. Flicking a light switch or going to the door if someone knocks rank very far down the list of things I need to automate and complicate. (Of course, if someone is mobility-impaired I can fully understand why devices to help with these things could be useful, but that’s a corner case.)
Clean the house, wash and put away the dishes, do laundry? In other words, truly interact with the physical world. Now we’d be talking. But most smart home devices can’t actually do any of these things or, if they do, they do so in such a limited way that they’re effectively useless. There are partial exceptions, like the Roomba and its knockoffs, but even those require the right layout of house to be genuinely useful.
Furthermore, a lot of this stuff not only solves problems we don’t have, but does it badly. I’m pretty experienced with electronics and networking and I still fully expect that unboxing one of these creations will be the prelude to an hour or two of cursing, upgrading firmware, rebooting and other aggravations.
User experience rules
By contrast, smartphones and consumer-oriented web apps won because they were better. Consumers liked iPhones and Android phones better than they liked BlackBerry phones. They liked modern, responsive web interfaces better than they liked their enterprise apps.
That’s not hard. Admittedly, a user experience that leads to sending a ballistic missile warning by mistake is a particularly extreme case in point. But, let’s face it, a lot of traditional enterprise apps are pretty user hostile. But consumer IoT hasn’t put user experience in the forefront as successful consumer products do.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The post When IoT puts the user last appeared first on Statii News.
source http://news.statii.co.uk/when-iot-puts-the-user-last/
No comments:
Post a Comment