I saw many smart home and home Internet of Things (IoT) products at the 2017 Consumer Electronic Show (CES). All were interesting. All solved the wrong problems. And all missed the mark with real world buyers.

While today’s smart home products do useful things, they solve “first world” problems of convenience that are not useful to “real world” buyers.

This post discusses what problems that smart homes really need to solve, and provides some takeaways for smart home designers to consider to make their solutions more attractive to “real world” buyers.