"YOU HAVE TO START WITH THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE FIRST & WORK BACKWARDS to the design & technologY"

Most high end new residential construction projects we get involved in includes entertainment areas for the home owners, usually located in the basements. A lot of these homes come with Home Theaters, Poker Rooms, Pool & Game Rooms, Night Clubs, Karaoke Rooms and other form of entertainment. Considering the cost of these builds outs and how little they actually get used, is that a successful product?

To the contrary, the iPhone is the most successful product ever made. People spend an average of seven hours per day using it and the device has made Apple the most valuable company in the world. From a entertainment point of view, what is it that this product has that these entertainment areas clearly don't, and can we learn something from it to bring some of the iPhones Mojo to these types of homes?

The essential qualities of the most successful technology products

• Versatility: Big part of it's success lies in the endless amount of apps that let's you do so many different things.

• Quality: From the simplicity of the interface to the quality of the hardware and how well the interplay between hardware and software works are all contributing factors to that success.

• Accessibility: A major factor of the iPhones success is it's mobility. If you hade to go down to the basement every time you wanted to use it, the iPhone would never have become the successful product it is today no matter how great it was.

Same goes for Amazon to Mercedes, Sonos to Samsung. None of these companies wouldn't be here today if they didn't focus on these core qualities.

The Room

Translate these qualities to the entertainment room build concept that this is all about, it looks something like this.

• This room needs to include as many experiences as reasonably possible.

• Each and every room experience need to be as great as humanly possible in all aspects.

• This room needs to be easily accessible, close by and not down in a basement somewhere. It essentially needs to be your family room and just like the iPhone or a high end super car, it needs to be esthetically designed to blend in with the rest of the home. 

The additional benefits

There are two qualities that the iPhone is not very good at though, that most people consider really important in life that this room strive to achieve.

• Promote interaction: The iPhone is a solo endeavor, it's you and your device. Most people consider spending quality time with friends and family really important and this room promotes that.
• Create immersive experiences: If you ever watched a movie or played a game on an iPhone it's not very engaging. This room gives you truly immersive experiences.

The true purpose of the family room is the place for the family to spend time together. If the room provide experiences so great that they actually make you feel something people would be a lot more likely to spend time together doing things in it.

How products evolve to become great

With the iPhone you have instant access to all worlds knowledge, cars can drive themselves and if you order something from Amazon, you can have at your doorstep tomorrow. If you give that a moments thought, you might realize how incredibly complex that actually is but how did they get to that point? What all these products have in common is that at some point in their product development, one company invented a version of the product that was so groundbreaking and obvious to how that particular product should be made that every other company gave up their own ideas and started to copy that company. 

With cars it was the Ford Model-T and with the mobile phone it was the iPhone.

What happens at that point is that the core design aspects stay the same and the companies are focusing on how to improve on those core aspects. When a car company starts working on a new model, they don't sit around and debate how many wheels the car should have or where the steering wheel should go. They instead focus on the aspect of the excisting product and how it can be improved. That's how these products have evolved to where they are today. In high end new construction, the wheels are reinvented every single time and that's why you have technology in homes with features that are light years behind what you see in these other products.