Case Study : Smart Bird Feeder

She is obsessed with birds and feeds them around her yard at several different stations. She buys the best seed, and keeps the feeders full year round. In the fall she doesn’t cut back her lush dune grass or shrubs so as to keep habitat for her flying friends to overwinter within. The bird bath is always fresh. When she’s at the kitchen sink she can watch the action at one station outside the window. It’s a busy spot where she regularly spots a cardinal couple, he often feeding her, while many other visitors line up along the nearby fence, waiting their turn to enter the fray.

For Christmas one year her children gave her a Smart Bird Feeder, this after they saw how enamored she was of her niece’s on vacation. It was a great gift, a thoughtful gift, everyone was excited, especially Herself, who had seen how easy it was to view these special creatures up close as they ate because the feeder, smartly, has a motion-sensor camera that captures and sends images directly to your phone! What wasn’t so smart about the feeder was the connection required by the household router. In aiding her to set up this exciting feeder, it was discovered, several steps in, and in talking to the internet provider, that a NEW router was required for the thing to function. Turns out the feeder was smarter than the house! It took some time to get the router replaced, calls to the provider to arrange and negotiate, multiple service visits to install, to upgrade, and to update the somethings or others that only the provider understood. Eventually the house had a happy and compliant router and it was time to revisit and complete the Smart Feeder setup, installation, and Grand Opening. All went off without a hitch, the feeder beeped at all the correct times, the smart phone and the smart feeder recognized each other, and Her relationship with her birds entered an exciting new realm of observation and appreciation. Where once she purposely left her phone in a room where she was NOT, she now listens for notifications announcing another visit and she looks at the pictures to see who has been there, what noises they made, and how much they ate.

The Smart Bird Feeder was a seemingly beautiful and benign gift for a bird lover, but like many things, with the inability to set it up, it became another thing in a box. One of those things in the basement, or hall closet, a thing you were once excited about but now hide out of frustration, or possible embarrassment, and forget about, that cool thing that eventually gets donated in resignation.

Here is where I came in. As Held, I saw her needs, her problems, her hurdles, and I worked through the steps to get that Smart Bird Feeder out of the box and into her Life! So when her children come over she can take them in the yard and show them where it hangs, when they’re out to lunch together, and a notification comes in, she can show them pictures and videos of her cardinals having breakfast. It’s now a present that gives her joy every day.

Held helped do that.

Case Study : Smart Bird Feeder

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