Smart Home devices are still a relatively new form of technology, but the market is now flooding as the demand for Smart Home products increases at an exponential rate. While many of these products are high-quality and innovative, many lag behind their competitors. While the actual “smart” device may be well designed and manufactured, the accompanying web or mobile apps are often severely lacking in several key areas. This has a negative impact on the end user experience and can be the deciding factor between the success or failure of a product.

Smart Home devices range from light switches, thermostats, security systems, and even fully-functioning robots. Smart technology is being rolled out pretty much everywhere in the home right now, and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. While the diversity of Smart Home products varies considerably, a key factor in their overall success must be “usability”. In a highly competitive market, any product that is not intuitive to use, the customer will simply switch to a competitor’s product…done!

Traditional usability testing will be isolated from a specific web app or mobile app. However, with smart home devices, usability testing needs to encompass the entire product, meaning the device itself and the apps that come with it. For smart home devices whose usability has been tested to a high level, this will result in the user having a positive experience while using the product.

A good quality assurance company will evaluate a smart home device and its associated web or mobile applications along with any supporting documentation. From there, appropriate test approaches and methodologies can be defined and documented in a formal test plan. Often an optional set of test cases will be designed. Many usability issues are often seen during the onboarding process. As this is the area that is typically used to set up a new smart home device, it is of the utmost importance that the user has a positive experience here.

By methodically working not only on onboarding, but also on all end-user workflows, user scenarios, help/support documentation, etc. testing can uncover all usability issues that can be clearly documented for all product stakeholders to evaluate. The development team can then work with the usability defect reports to resolve the issues. Ideally, usability testing should be done before the product is released; however, since most smart home devices and their associated applications can be updated with new firmware/software updates, usability testing can also be very effective after the initial product release.