Trying out Ikea’s new smart lightbulbs
I’ve been trying out Ikea’s new Trådfri smart lightbulbs, because Nat got some and they looked good.
Which is how I found myself doing a firmware reset on my lightbulbs.
What is it?
They’re lightbulbs, that are dimmable and have changeable colour temperature. They have wireless remotes, and there’s an app.
Why would you do this?
Like Nat, I had no interest in smart lighting before this. Why take something that already works in my home and make it more fiddly to use (though an app vs light switch) or easier to break (what if the wifi goes down etc)?
The videos and GIFs on their Swedish product page are what convinced me to give it a try. They sold me on the use case, the problem, and the interaction design.
There’s these clear little interaction demos:
I like that floating gestural puck. Clear cause and effect, like a normal dimmer switch but no longer attached to the wall.
Beyond that there’s stuff like:
Huh, I guess it is weird that the only place in the room I can change lighting is a fixed button on the wall at the room entrance. And that when I’m reading and it starts to get dark I have to get up and walk over to the door instead of using a remote wherever I am.
And it sure looks appealing changing the lights in a multi-purpose room. Shifting between reading/eating/cooking etc. Previously that meant lots of different lamps/fixtures with different colour temperature bulbs and going around to a lot of switches.
With previous smart bulbs the main feature I’ve seen is the RGB colour changing, but I can’t see much point to turning my room red or purple or green. Changing colour temperature for different activities however seems much more useful.
Not something to show off to guest with, but something that helps make a more pleasant home.
Normal and experimental
I like the mix of form factors, both in lights and interfaces.
There’s normal bulbs, to replace existing halogens and lamps and stuff. But then there’s glowing light panels and doors. Because why should light be shaped like an incandescent bulb? The constraints that caused that form factor are now gone.
Then there’s the interfaces. The app looks competently done. The remote looks fine, sensible, if a bit boring. But then there’s the accelerometer puck. Looks playful. Colourful yellow as opposed to off-white plastic like the rest of the range.
Plenty of variety.
Affordable
A normal E27 bulb is £8, while a smart one is £9.
The easiest way to start is the £15 pack for a bulb and a remote. At that price I might as well try it on one lamp and see how I find it.
But like everything in ikea, while individually items are cheap, it quickly adds up. While I’m in the shop I guess I might as well buy the gateway to use the app, it’s only £25 more. And just a few more bulbs, because one alone doesn’t make it worthwhile…
In-store
I was keen to see it in-store. How do you sell the problem and the lifestyle in a retail display? And explain which components are needed for which outcomes? Do people get to play with the interaction before hand? Have they got a display room? Or those wooden blocks in the online photos?
No, it’s a mess. The smart bulbs are shelved next to normal bulbs. They’re not differentiated from the normal bulbs.
There are some smart bulbs in display boxes, but most aren’t plugged in. The one’s that are plugged in, don’t have a control for customers to try out changing colour temperature and brightness. There’s a TV presumably to show demo videos, but it’s switched off.
There’s no signage or paper guide to which bits do you need to get started, or what each of the pieces do.
It reminded me of Alexander Grünsteidl’s talk from This Happened a few years ago. Perhaps these kinds of interactive products are better sold online, with video and GIFs and diagrams, than in retail.
Setup
The unboxing and setup isn’t the friendliest. The packaging is hard to open. There’s multiple different manuals in each box. Ikea’s trademark diagrammatic manuals don’t translate well to explaining the pairing of wireless networked devices.
Weirdly bulbs can’t be paired directly to the app/gateway. Every bulb has to be linked to a remote, and in turn that remote linked to the app/gateway.
Once it’s set up and working with the app it’s pretty clear to control and use.
But when there are problems (How do I make the remote only dim some of the lights? How do I change which group a bulb is in? Is this bulb actually paired with the remote?) it’s really hard to understand what’s wrong from the blinking LEDs, and what to do to fix it.
When a normal lightbulb breaks I know to try changing it, to check the fuse and to check if there’s a power cut. With a smart lightbulb, I’m not sure which things to check,
The only reliable solution I’ve found is to hardware reset everything and start again.
It’s during these frustrating times that I wonder about the returns policy. The bulbs aren’t broken, but they don’t work. How do I explain that at Ikea’s very defensive customer services counter?
At least when the wireless control parts of Trådfri breaks, it falls back to being a normal lightbulb, that I can control with a normal light switch. As Nat says, it doesn’t becomes a collection of expensive paperweights.
Living with it
So far, there’s some awkwardness. Having to launch an app to change colour temperature. The remote is never where I need it. But then, normal lightswitches are awkward too. This is just a new type of awkward. Once I work out what I want, and where what type of remote should live, it’ll be fine.
Local vs online
The first thing I wanted was Amazon Echo integration. Or IFTTT. Or siri.
But the ikea lightbulbs don’t work with these services. The bulbs are a local system, not connected to the internet. The app only works when you’re on the same wifi network as the gateway.
Nat covered some great points about local vs online and trust and security in their writeup. I’m also happy with this tradeoff, preferring something doesn’t stop working when an online service goes away. I can’t see when I’d want to control the lights remotely from outside the home anyway.
I think it’s interesting that visually there’s no difference between something that does processing/control locally (like Ikea) vs online on their servers (Hue, Nest).
Here’s what the starter kit looks like for Philips Hue.
And here’s what it looks like for Ikea Trådfri.
There’s no visual shorthand in the product for how they work on the backend.
On one hand, so long as it works and solves the problem the customer shouldn’t care. But on the other, the customer should be able to understand the tradeoffs and make an informed decision while shopping.
Likewise, The Sun covered the launch of Trådfri by scaremongering about hacked bulbs joining botnets, even though these bulbs aren’t online and use Zigbee rather than Wifi. How can the consumer understand that?
Is this something that should be solved through designing the product to represent its network backend? Or by giving people tools, such as privacy conscious router or user friendly port scanning app, to help them understand what the devices in their home are doing? Or perhaps its something the retailers or reviewers of these products should be flagging up?
Or maybe its something that should be part of the very architecture of homes?
Anyway. These are some notes.
Mostly, Ikea did pretty good I think. A solid first networked product. Something that’s trying to solve a problem, rather than being a gadget. Well done Ikea.
Nat also wrote about their experience with the lightbulbs in more detail.
