Lately, I have been working on getting my home smarter. I am doing this by buying some stuff; building some stuff and hacking some stuff. I have been at it for 3 years now. While I like most of the connected gadgets I am repulsed with the idea that every device needs to be connected to the internet to become useful. As someone who believes in the power of the internet and wants everyone to be connected to it; I rather dislike the idea of most connected gadgets.

The reason I hate it is because I believe most of the connected gadgets that we see are actually a bandaid for poor UX design in consumer (electronic) products.

The consumer electronic industry seldom works like a product company but rather a manufacturing company. Just look at the number of buttons on your TV’s remote and you will see that you haven’t used most of the buttons in years. I mean; I have worked in technology over 10 years now and yet my washing machine stares at me everytime I have have to wash my clothes. Will it get angry if I wash woollen clothes as polyester? Oh; what if my woollen are polyester? 😮 What do I do? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a small sensor which can actually take this decision for me. After all; its a fully automatic washing machine! 😃

Most of the technology to make these dumb consumer devices intelligent has been there for years and its cheap. Unfortunately, the consumer manufacturers remain exactly what their name suggests “manufacturers” and never (or atleast it seems) spent time and effort on consumer feedback or improving user experience.

I expect the business of these manufacturers to change drastically as IoT and Voice AI platforms rise. They are going to become commodity producers from product makers.

The devices are going to become commodity and the smartness which connected devices or voice AI provides is where the money will be. It will not kill these companies just make them less profitable. We are already seeing this with Xiaomi which is huge in China.

Completely off-topic; but talking of dumb and smart things; have you worked with React and Redux recently? Don’t you just love the concept of these dumb components being made smarter by Redux! Dumb components in React-land are pure JavaScript functions and don’t have any data. They are just the looks and feels. Add in Redux and it passes smartness via the props (attributes) and voila your component is magical! Sometimes when you are building some component you will realise that the dumb component does not make sense and only a smart component is needed. Why? Because the UI will always be used with the data. A good software engineer should know when to split his component in smart and dumb components and when to create a tightly coupled one. Software-engineering is way ahead in terms of design compared to hardware. 🤪However; I think some of the apprehensions of using connected devices might get sorted in the future as edge AI becomes more mainstream and devices are in-built with smartness.

I wish the consumer electronic manufacturers cared a bit about us and their products and not just their sales number. Until that day arrives; we will have to keep doing the extra homework we get whenever we buy a new consumer electronic device.