Background: Following the trend in the consumer product industry, an increasing number of projects developed by industrial design students is now exploring the potential uses of IoT technology. For design students and educators, the IoT represents a radical shift in the design and development of products; whereas products were traditionally isolated or only interacting with their immediate surrounding, connected products rely on interdependent ecosystems of objects, sensors and databases dispersed far and wide and are capable of ever more complex behaviors. This article attempts to uncover some of the issues that still prevent the public from acquiring IoT products and that young designers and design educators may want to address in order to develop rewarding, safe and sustainable IoT product experiences. Methods: Using interviews and surveys, this article gathers the opinions, expectations and concerns of young and middle-aged Korean consumers in using connected products and services. Results: Korean consumers both young and old seem quite pragmatic when it comes to embracing the IoT; they are mostly ready to accept connected devices and a variety of new services, but show a clear preference for products designed for comfort and ease of use. As for any product, the relationship between cost and perceived value is an essential aspect of the purchase of IoT devices. However, for increasingly well-informed consumers, issues of privacy, usability, as well as reliability, maintenance, health impact, energy consumption have become important purchase criteria that may orient consumers towards competing products. Conclusions: The result of this survey indicates that a large part of young designers does not intuitively choose to tackle those issues and therefore design educators may want to specifically develop strategies to address and integrate them to the development of connected products. Doing so and in order to compete in an increasingly crowded market, designers may take both technical advantages of the IoT technology as well as desires and concerns of the consumers into careful consideration in order to develop appealing, rewarding, convenient, safe and sustainable products and services.