You’ll also need to consider the cost to the user of switching from whatever
they were using previously. Household technology, like heating and alarm
systems, tends to last years and users won’t want to replace working boilers,
sensors or other kit at great expense without a significant benefit^8. If you can
support retrofit – new technology that can easily be integrated into old systems
- without greatly increasing the cost of your product, you’ll increase the
potential market for the product.
In the context of UX, the perceived cognitive effort to use your product and
the time it will take to get it set up and working affect who will buy it, and
why. Be careful in your judgment here. In the thick of a project when you are
excited about your idea, it’s easy to overestimate how motivated users are to
invest time in your product.
Smart homes are a typical example here. It’s been possible to connect up
lighting, heating, appliances and entertainment systems for around 40 years, as
we saw earlier. But you needed to be an enthusiast to set it up and program it
(or wealthy enough to pay someone else to do that). A niche of users has taken
great pride in their automated homes, but others have found them fraught with
support issues, technology failures, and a poor fit with the needs of other
guests and residents. Mass-market users often view home automation with
suspicion: home is a very personal context, and one in which we are often
loath to introduce novel technologies that might break our established routines.
Most of us don’t want to have to do a load of programming just so we can turn
lights on and off. We manage that well enough already and it’s an effort to
switch unless the benefits are really evident.
Adding extra cognitive effort to everyday tasks is a common risk. The UX
strategist Scott Jenson proposes the idea of the ‘surprise package’: the mature
consumer product that is ‘enhanced’ technologically, turning it back into an
early adopter product. As Jenson puts it: “Companies take product concepts
(^8) C.F. the model of shearing layers, which describes buildings as a set of components
that evolve and obsolesce over different timescales. ‘Services’, like HVAC and
plumbing, are expected to last 7-15 years. This concept originates from architect Frank
Duffy and was developed by Stewart Brand in his book ‘How Buildings Learn: What
Happens After They’re Built’(1994, Viking Press).