Compare and contrast: the excitement around the release of the very first iPhone in 2007 vs. the hype around the iPhone 8. There’s a significant difference in the amount of eagerness and anticipation for these phones, 10 years and 15 models later. For consumers, these phones have become a fifth appendage and as a result, have come to blend in with the rest of their daily lives; only given a second thought when it breaks or doesn’t work. Access control, in a sense, is essentially the smartphone of the technology and security industries. There’s nothing overly flashy or ostentatious about it; it just simply works and remains consistent in its foundation and performance. However, in recent tech media outlets, the iPhone’s consistency is something that has been dubbed “boring”. Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of consumers still love its unchanging and familiar user experience. Which is what got us thinking that perhaps the kind of technology and products that we produce should follow along these lines.

The Value of Consistency

What many critics of the smartphone are overlooking is the value in the consistent and straightforward nature of the product. When it comes to the smartphone’s user experience and performance, consumers know exactly what they’re getting. But if the user experience varies and is unpredictable it causes frustration. This is not unlike access control products, because if a user has an interaction with an access control platform that proves to be inconsistent in performance, then the end result is the same level of frustration produced by an unreliable phone.

Seamless Experiences

In 2017, access control (and even our smartphones) should be something that we can take for granted, so much so that it shouldn’t even be a thought in our minds, and become a reliably, uneventful part of our lives. With the latest technology, the next generation of access control is capable of offering a passive experience, where users can seamlessly be authenticated and admitted through a point of access. There should be no extra step in the access process wherein users must present a credential to a reader. We live in an age where access control technology can and should readily recognize who is approaching the check-point and over time come to learn users’ regular comings and goings to make the granting of access more perceptive and efficient. These are processes that should come to be natural to users due to their reliable and unchanging nature. There should be no question of a system’s quality or any coin-tossing on whether or not the system will perform adequately.

At UniKey, we deliver mobile access control solutions that are unobtrusive and homogenous in performance so as to provide the most ideal and nearly predictable user experiences. Our mobile key readers are constantly using the latest in technological advances like machine learning and BLE in order to make office and home security adept, dependable and simple. To learn more about the industry’s most reliable mobile key platform, please visit unikey.com

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