How to meet consumer expectations for the Internet of things? (survey results)

Connected devices, including smartphones and wearable electronics, no doubt represent an important and often predominant part of household devices in our lives. However, the solutions and technologies available today often work separately and fragmented, and sometimes it takes a lot of effort to get them synchronized with each other. Therefore, it is important that the main players in this industry work closely with each other, achieve compatibility of their devices, providing the most holistic and unified user experience.

In order to better navigate this issue and look into the future, we commissioned several large-scale studies that will help us evaluate exactly how consumers imagine the ideal user experience in a modern connected world.



Since 2016, we have interviewed more than 5 thousand consumers from nine countries and got acquainted with their opinions, ideas, impressions and experience. The results obtained allowed us to better understand the current (and future) desires of consumers - we learned what their expectations are from the ecosystem of connected facilities, and also found out what points should be paid to device manufacturers, retailers and suppliers of OTT services.

In the course of the consumer survey, three main lines emerged that raise most of the questions:

  1. Trusted Connected Objects Problem
  2. The urgent need for a unified consumer experience
  3. Service personalization

In order to better illustrate the findings and fully reflect the “aspirations of the people”, we decided to take the help of two fictional characters.

Meet Paul and Emma.


Emma and Paul are closely following the development of technology - they are well acquainted with the solutions and products available on the market today and have great expectations for the future. Below we give a few examples and excerpts that will allow you to get a more complete picture of the expectations of Emma and Paul.

Let's start with a representative analysis of the data and first turn to Emma. It represents the many consumers who want a unified user experience that allows them to manage the most diverse aspects of their life with maximum convenience - through their smartphone. Therefore, we must remember that the smartphone becomes the center of our connected life, it is important to ensure a coordinated interaction of all the main parties involved in creating this consumer experience. Without close cooperation, this will not be possible. However, in this case, the burden of responsibility lies mainly with mobile phone manufacturers, since almost half of the respondents (46%) consider


But the aspirations of users are by no means limited to the ability to control their lives through a smartphone. For example, Paul would like to use his phone as an identity card. A similar use case has already been implemented in Colorado (USA), where the Digital Drivers Licenses system has been deployed in pilot mode. We emphasize once again that for the implementation of such initiatives, closer interaction between various industry participants is necessary.


Another key discovery in our research has been the importance that consumers place on data privacy issues, and in particular data segregation. Users want to control for themselves who will have access to this or that data, and they want access control to be easy and safe, without any fuss. Such expectations are quite feasible, especially when you consider that Emma would like to connect all her devices through a single contract.


Consumers also expect the full use of biometric technologies. In particular, they believe that biometric authentication methods, for example, using fingerprint scanning or face recognition, will become widespread in the future and will become an integral attribute when working with a mobile phone. In addition, consumers expect that security in mobile technologies will also be imperceptible to the user (60%). Moreover, while discussing the future mechanisms for unlocking their smartphones, they are users of the emergence of new forms of biometric authentication. In particular, 40% of respondents expect the appearance of voice biometrics, approximately the same number of users (43%) believe that scanning the iris of the eye will become widespread. As you can see

Of course, we have given just a few examples. You can learn more about consumer expectations in our report .

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