In this series, we explore 4 critical questions to ask about your AgeTech innovation before going to market to ensure you are creating consumer relevance and maximizing your in-market potential.
Before launching or investing in an AgeTech innovation, ask yourself these questions first to make sure you're betting on the right play and/or to make sure your innovation is the best it can be to succeed in market.
Question #4: Is your AgeTech "easy"? Will your user think so?
As mentioned in Article #3, all innovations are designed to solve a problem or meet a need for user. Inherently, users are doing something today to solve that problem or meet that need before the new innovation is launched.
In order ensure you are creating a relevant AgeTech innovation that will succeed in market, you’ll need to understand to what extent your target end user will find your innovation easy and convenient to adopt and use instead of whatever they are doing today.
"The key here is not your perceptions of ease and convenience, but rather the perceptions of the user relative to whatever they are doing today to meet that need."
Creating something “smart” or developing new “tech” may be more likely to make some product categories easier to use than others. Part of answering the question of “is it easy?” involves understanding the extent to which your new AgeTech can be and will be integrated into a broader digital/tech network.
Does your end user think your AgeTech innovation will make things easier for them? Or do they think it will add complexity?
This is particularly important in cases in which the AgeTech innovation is designed to move people from a non-tech solution to a tech-based solution. You’ll need to understand if the end user perceives the AgeTech to be something that is easier than their non-tech solution or to be something which adds a layer of complexity.
For example, several home fragrance and air care companies have innovated ‘smart’ solutions in which users can control their air care/home fragrance devices from an app on their phones. Currently, consumers can simply push buttons as needed or use a product that automatically adds freshener/fragrance to the air. In this case, making the products ‘smarter’ has added more complexity and less convenience than current products. In other words, it’s smart for the sake of being smart.
Similarly, using a standard toaster is generally pretty easy, well understood and involves a very limited number of steps. Now, I could buy a Toasteroid... but why would I want to add the step of downloading an app, setting it up, and then using the app to set my toaster when currently all I have to do is put the bread in and turn a dial?
Ensuring ongoing convenience/ease of use is critical to long-term relevance and market growth, and will need to be a focus of product development.
In addition, it is key to identify additional elements of potential difficulty that either require product adjustments to improve convenience and/or communication or support to help users overcome barriers.
For instance, is it easy to set-up or install? As this only happens once, it doesn’t impact ongoing ease of use perceptions and long-term relevance, but if users don’t perceive this step as easy, it can be a barrier to initial adoption.
User feedback and testing throughout the development process can pinpoint where your innovation is easier vs. more complicated in the eyes of the user – and what you should do about it.
Does your AgeTech innovation have high or low integration potential into your users’ existing digital/tech toolkit?
A key driver of relevance within the Smart Home sector is integration. The more successful innovations have tended to be those that easily integrate multiple product categories or solutions.
Smart Speakers are the prime example of a sub-category within Smart Home that took off largely due to their ability to easily integrate across multiple parts of the users’ digital, tech and home ecosystem, from Spotify to smart lightbulbs to shopping.
"For new innovations today, 'works with' is critical."
Any AgeTech innovations need to work within the ecosystem the user has now, or is likely to have in the near future, from both a hardware and an interface perspective. This is paramount to mass adoption; a closed system of products which cannot connect to anything else has limited potential.
As the innovator, you’ll need to identify what your innovation needs to “work with” to create broad relevance among your users.
Does it need to work with digital health tools or applications? Does it need to work with a Smart Watch? A Smart Phone? A Smart Speaker? A Home Security System? A Health Tracker?
What all are they using today? Where can your innovation fit in and where should it fit in to that ecosystem? And what does that mean for your product development and go-to-market strategy?
Getting the Right Perspective
As always, these questions are best answered from the users’ perspective, not the innovator’s perspective.
Morning Light Strategy Foundational Consumer Research can help you better understand the end users’ current ecosystem of tech and digital solutions and determine where your innovation best fits, identify opportunities and barriers, and point the way forward in terms of product development and marketing strategies that can maximize your in-market success potential.
Morning Light Strategy Innovation Research can help you more specifically optimize your offer, your marketing and your go-to-market strategy by putting your concept or your prototype in front of your target users to assess, refine and optimize all elements of your product, positioning, claims, benefits, variants, pricing, etc.
How "easy" is your AgeTech for your users? What does that mean for you?
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About: Morning Light Strategy is an insights & advisory agency on a mission to help brands and organizations plan and position for the global shift toward an older demographic. We help our clients make the strategic business, marketing and innovation decisions that will accelerate their growth among 50+ consumers and their caregivers. To learn more, visit: www.morninglightstrategy.com
