- Bayern Innovativ
- The consumer-friendly smart home
Smart Home promises to make life at home easier through networked functions - refrigerator, TV and heating talk to each other to provide the most comfortable home possible. Whereby the occupants always have control over all areas of home living via a dashboard.
The smart home has not yet become widely accepted. The consumer issues platform wanted to know why this is so, and asked users and smart home manufacturers in workshops and interviews.
The result of the analysis is a comprehensive synopsis of consumer* requirements and the interrelationships in the smart home market - in excerpts here on the site, and in detail in our whitepaper.
Ahead of the curve, users care about implementing useful facilitation, staying in control, making everyone in the household happy - and tinkering.
On this page, we detail what the consumer-friendly smart home looks like, and what manufacturers can do to offer this perfect smart home.
This is what a consumer-friendly smart home looks like
In the interviews, a clear picture emerged: users want a gain in comfort. The more automated the processes at home, for example a lighting system that activates itself in the evening, the more relaxed everyday life becomes.
In terms of implementation, consumers want complete networking of all smart household applications, including central control. So-called all-in-one systems can be produced both by companies from a single source and in the course of a symbiosis of several products from different manufacturers. However, the market is currently dominated by individual applications that either cannot be combined at all or only to a limited extent with a few other products. This is accompanied by the problem that the customer service landscape is fragmented with unclear responsibilities and there are too few trained specialists who can install smart home systems at home. The installation is being transferred to the users on the grounds that the installation is part of the smart home experience. However, not everyone has a passion for tinkering. Many prefer user-friendly plug-and-play products that can be installed quickly without a lot of preparatory work and are ready to go right away.
In addition, users demand resilient systems, i.e. applications that continue to work without any problems even offline or, as far as technically possible, in the event of a power failure. In the same way, these smart home applications should also be durable. However, the length of time people live in their domicile is greater than the life cycle of software, which is costly for companies to maintain. With hardware, things look more positive for users.
Not to be forgotten: Emotions play a significant role in purchasing decisions. For example, the fun of building things in is very important for tinkerers, which is also accompanied by social aspects, such as status symbols or the formation of communities. The security feeling of users should be considered in that it not only means security against burglary, but also safeguards against hacker attacks in the course of the digitalization of the household. Users should have control over and transparent insight into their individual smart home data in order to preserve their own digital sovereignty.
Our Smart Home Stakeholder Process
To find out what a consumer-friendly smart home is, the Theme Platform Consumer Concerns conducted its own investigation and, in the course of six interviews with experts and three participatory workshops, allowed voices from both the consuming and producing sides to have their say - in the sense of a participatory design process. The aim was for both sides to be actively involved in the process with their perspectives and wishes, and to enter into dialogue with each other in order to find out what consumer-friendliness means in the smart home context and how it can be implemented in the future. In the course of our analysis, we developed recommendations for action for policymakers and especially for companies. Our study was funded by the Bavarian State Ministry for the Environment and Consumer Protection.
Recommendations for smart home companies
With the smart home, it is central that companies get to the bottom of the everyday needs of users and adapt their products to the respective groups. Thus, user-friendly and intuitive interfaces need to be designed. Since purchasing decisions are emotionally driven, smart home applications should generate the best possible benefit for as many household members as possible in order to promote acceptance at home.
Widget stores are also a good way for users to design their own automated processes and discover new functions. In addition, solution paths in the event of technical problems or Internet and power failures should of course be clearly understandable and easy to view. Customer service has to be accessible.
To expand their own service portfolio, companies can also offer manual support for both their own and third-party smart home products. This is particularly interesting for hub manufacturing companies, which are already one of the first points of contact for those seeking help with their control elements for several smart home products. Instead of forwarding customers, they could send their own experts. This saves the concerning further inconveniences.
In the range data security there are already in other places numerous action recommendations and collections. The topic platform points therefore only however for it urgently to the concept Privacy by Design (see https://privacybydesign.digital/). One principle for consumers is the transparent insight into the processing of their data and the possibility to actively decide on its use. Data protection dashboards can be used as a representation of this, with which all smart home applications can be viewed and centrally controlled at a single interface.
However, a dashboard only makes sense if there are linking points between the individual applications. To ensure interoperability, manufacturing companies should offer common interfaces and standards and build overarching platforms to which different devices can be docked. These compatible products should be labeled with graphics and databases so that interested parties can recognize them as such right away.
Recommendations to policymakers
Our smart home analysis also crystallized some recommendations to be addressed to policymakers - documented in detail in our whitepaper.
So we advocate keeping in mind the right of users to resell and repair their smart home systems. Public funding should only continue to be paid out if the installations are proven to be energy efficient and result in identifiable energy savings. In addition, the ZD.B Consumer Issues Theme Platform proposes the establishment of a security update fund that would ensure the maintenance of smart home applications even after the operating company is no longer present on the market.
Recommendations for consumers
From a consumer perspective, a few guiding questions have emerged to ask before purchasing a smart home. For example, why one wants the smart home, and whether other people in the household feel the same way. Or how to ensure that no private data goes outside the home, or that the devices continue to work even if the Internet fails.
Our smart home guiding questions can be found in the Bavarian consumer portal:
>> Smart Home Decision Guide: What to Consider Before Buying
Whitepaper "The consumer-friendly smart home"
In the whitepaper, we not only present what constitutes the consumer-friendly smart home and how to implement it as a company, but also outline the smart home market in Germany. If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us - we will also be happy to put you in touch with experts!
Download whitepaper now free of charge
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