W15 - Scenario-Driven Design Thinking

Huawei recently launched its whole-home smart system. After watching several demo videos, I’m optimistic about their approach. Smart home technology is no longer novel, but most efforts still focus on individual smart devices. Designing single devices and designing an integrated whole-home system are entirely different challenges, and a company that truly nails the latter has yet to emerge. From my own experience, connecting many devices to the network often degrades the user experience. The difficulty of whole-home intelligence lies in tightly integrating every node on the same network so each device becomes an active joint. Huawei proposes a 1+2+N product scheme: one main hub, two networks, and N scenarios. It mirrors the design philosophy of Wang Ziruo’s “home of the future” from a few years ago. Undoubtedly, Wang’s implementation is costly and demands strong DIY skills — his reputation for being demanding is well earned. Lowering the entry barrier is one reason I’m hopeful about Huawei’s consumer-oriented solution.

What impressed me further was how clearly it revealed an evolution in product design thinking. Hardware iteration has generally moved from supply-chain-driven, to product-driven, and now to scenario-driven. In earlier years, hardware upgrades looked upward: for example, white goods integrated new technologies and modules from upstream suppliers without much regard for whether users needed them — that’s supply-chain-driven. During the mobile internet era, internet-era product thinking influenced hardware: iterations began to come from user needs and experience focus, a downward-looking process. Typically, a single device would be improved to solve a specific problem better — exemplified by many of Xiaomi’s IoT products — which is product-driven. Today, under the large backdrop of ubiquitous connectivity, we’ve entered an era of scenarios: the same device behaves heterogeneously across spaces — phone usage in a car, at home, or in the office — and user needs switch as the user moves between those spaces. Huawei captured this trend by offering scenarios as the basic unit of operation rather than the on/off of individual devices. Users only need to care whether they’re entertaining guests or watching a show, not how to adjust the indoor lighting.

This also calls to mind the subtle relationship between operational precision and user experience. Apple often exploits this trade-off by elevating the smallest unit of interaction and sacrificing some control precision to gain a better overall experience. For example, from its inception the iPhone camera hid professional photographic settings from users and replaced them with modes. The iPad Pro’s cursor uses a snap-to proximity algorithm instead of giving users absolute control over cursor position.