People will pay for consumer technology that just works out of the box. On day one. Without the need for an instruction manual.
Consumers quickly fall in love with products when they’re sleek, convenient and easy to understand. This simple truth extends across hardware, from smartphones to voice-activated speakers to a number of Bluetooth-adjacent devices with folksy names.
As the iPod turns 25 and the Nest thermostat turns 15, introducing new technology into people’s lives should be a straightforward process by now. But it’s not.
Setup should take seconds. There should be a swift app download or email confirmation and, boom, the tech is online and already at work solving near-daily problems or making life easier for users. Once online, the products should fade to the background. People want the benefits of technology without making it their whole personality.
But the opposite is more common.
The allure of a connected device, accessory or appliance often outshines its utility. From the Fortune 500 down to the startup that was born yesterday, this breakdown repeats itself. And it’s why consumer hardware is one tough business and the world is filled with crappy products.
In the case of smart glasses, just because a pair can record daily life’s moments and save them to the cloud doesn’t mean they should. Or that we want them to. Or that our lives fundamentally improve in any way at all.
Now, on the flip side, smartphones took off because they provided a foundation for an entire ecosystem to exist and evolve beyond anything the original device was designed for. It helped that they easily slipped into our pockets or purses and basically became extensions of our hands.
While I was at Apple, Steve Jobs pushed us to build the iPhone, iPod and iPad with an entire ecosystem in mind. We focused on user experience and customer value first, then moved on to technology and operational excellence. As the App Store ecosystem took off, Apple’s engineers designed the iPhone to wow and to be as frictionless an experience as possible. That also meant unboxing, setup and account management.
It took a little while, but Bluetooth speakers took off once Amazon, Google and others shipped a device that fit on a table or shelf. For a small piece of real estate roughly the size of a large coaster, people can now access endless libraries and repositories of information, music, podcasts and audio entertainment.
The best home appliances like fridges and dishwashers, home tech like Nest and cars become so familiar that we make dinner, adjustments to the temperature downstairs or hands-free calls without thinking about the technology itself.
Tech should fade into the background, at home and on the move.
And that’s exactly why smart glasses are failing. They are literally in the middle of your face. It’s impossible to avoid constantly noticing them on your own face or on others.
The same thing is true of other wearable tech like virtual reality headsets. Even though you may be able to enter a virtual world and entertain yourself, everyone else in the vicinity is excluded from the experience and, likely, inconvenienced.
It’s why the question asked by most companies, “Can we build it?” is the wrong question. Instead, let’s take inspiration from Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum’s Jurassic Park character) and admit that past hardware builders were “so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." In other words, we should be asking, “Will people actually want to live with this?”
We carry smartphones because they fit our pockets and our hands. We wear earbuds because other people can largely ignore them. We install connected thermostats because they quietly manage the temperature without requiring constant monitoring to save energy.
The best hardware products persist because they ask for nothing of the consumer and deliver everything they were made to.
In this new era of advanced AI, people building devices, hardware and wearables need to build things that fade into normal life in ways users can’t live without.
Matt Rogers is the co-founder & CEO of Mill, a wasted food prevention company based in San Bruno, California. He is a founder of Incite.org, investing in early stage companies built to scale and bring change. He also co-founded Nest, acquired by Google in 2014. Prior to Nest, Matt worked with Steve Jobs to build the very first iPhone and device hardware in the 2000s.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.