Identifying opportunities to elevate the current product ecosystem.

Connected's Smart Home Report 2020

Connected’s Smart Home Report 2020 uses a Product Thinking methodology to take a deeper look at the current product landscape in the smart home space. We explore six trends, and their sub-trends, to offer up research-backed opportunity areas for guiding commercial innovation.

Overview

What You'll Learn

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The Generational Divide

The Healthy Home

Alternative Ways of Living

The Virtual Home

The demographics living in modern homes is radically changing, designing for everyone in one environment is a major challenge.

Health and wellbeing conscious users expect their products to fit their lifestyle, ensuring that their homes give them a healthy balance both mentally and physically is critical for product builders looking to serve this group.

People are clustering in a range of both traditional and non-traditional family units, building products that fit such a range of households requires a deep understanding of people’s differing contexts.

As AR and VR see an upsurge in adoption rates, product builders have an emerging toolkit for elevating the at-home experience.

About the Contributors

Lisanne Binhammer, Author

Lisanne is a Senior Product Designer at Connected with a passion for ethical and inclusive design. Most recently, she has worked on a discovery-based project for a client in the civic technology space. Outside of her day-to-day, Lisanne is the Director of Product Design Education at Bridge, a non-for-profit that levels up skills for marginalized groups in the tech sector. Her favourite smart home product (currently!) is the Portal Mini she shares with her partner. The Portal is such a wonderful way to stay connected with family during these challenging times.

Mikkel Lunding, Author

Mikkel is a Senior Product Strategist at Connected. With a background in design and product strategy and with more than a dozen large product explorations in his portfolio, Mikkel’s work is powered by a strong desire to reach simple and delightful user experiences in products across industries like consumer electronics, mobility and social media. Mikkel’s favourite smart home product is his multitude of Phillips Hue lightbulbs that ensure he can set the perfect lighting, and therefore the perfect mood, for any occasion.

Senior Product Designer

Senior Product Strategist

Dominic Smith, Author

Content Marketing Manager

Dominic is a writer and strategist, who has worked throughout his career to bring to light insights and opportunities that drive sustainable long-term growth. His work looks beyond sectors, focusing on the individual wants and desires of people that ultimately form the trends, behaviours, and landscape of the world we live in. His favourite smart home product is Nest because it allows him to walk into a warm home on cold winter nights without using more energy than is needed.

Hala Khoursheed, Author

Senior Product Designer

Hala is a Senior Product Designer at Connected that enjoys all stages of the design process. From user research, to wire framing, and working closely with developers, she finds value in being a part of the end-to-end journey on a problem that turns into a shipped solution. Her background in Industrial Design has equipped her to not design for one particular platform, yet stay up-to-date with the changing user behaviours, trends and emerging technologies. Hala’s favourite smart home product is her smart scale, Renpho, that allows her to track her progress and tap into other body metrics that standard scales don’t measure.

Tim Bettridge, Author

Senior Product Designer

When he’s not working with clients to identify and shape exciting new products, Tim Bettridge is busy shaping Connected’s research and development efforts, by conducting user and market research to better identify opportunity areas that help to guide teams towards building novel and new products and experiences. He does this in an effort to better explore the near future of emergent technologies and uncover their intersections as well as examine their ethical implications. Tim’s favourite smart home product is his game of 7 Google home and Alexa speakers that enable him to have voice interactions throughout his apartment; allowing him to control lighting, entertainment and even his humidifier.

Katie Luke, Designer

Marketing Graphic Designer

Katie is an award-winning Graphic Designer with a passion for illustration and package design. With every project, Katie aims to grow the Connected brand and help more organizations build better products. Her ability to work in a fast-paced work environment comes from her variety of experience in the television and film industry, from designing props to set decorating. Her favourite smart home product is her Google Home that she predominantly uses to ask cooking questions or read her recipe instructions when her hands are covered in food.

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The Sustainable Home

Environmental concern and the awareness of humanity’s impact on the planet has led to an increased desire for the home to be a carbon-neutral place, which in turn has created a greater demand for products that serve this desire.

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Small Homes

With urban populations (and the global population) continuing to grow, an emerging trend of increasingly small homes has meant that smart home product builders need to design with space in mind. 

The Household

The House

About Connected

Connected is a software product development firm. We partner with ambitious companies across the entire product development lifecycle, whether it's identifying opportunities and validating product concepts or releasing products and optimizing in market.

Successful product development requires solving for desirability, viability, feasibility, and usability together, not separately. That’s why we bring engineers, strategists, and designers together, blending discovery and delivery activities at every possible step to think holistically about product. It is this “connectedness” and product-thinking approach, regardless of the stage in the product development lifecycle, that enables us to drive true impact.