Designing Connected Products

Chapter 12. Supporting Key Interactions

BY CLAIRE ROWLAND WITH MARTIN CHARLIER^[192]

This chapter sets out some practical requirements for key interactions that are common to different types of connected products.

There will be many aspects of your design that are not covered here as they will be unique to your product or market. But regardless of what your product does it will almost certainly need ways to do some of the following:

• Get the system set up and devices connected

• Access controls and data

• Manage devices and alerting behavior

• Configure and manage automated behaviors

In some interactions, such as device pairing, technical requirements will mean that your design has to follow a tightly scripted flow. We’ve described these in detail. In other interactions, such as accessing controls, there may be many possible design solutions. Here, we’ve shown examples of common design approaches currently used in live products to provide starting points for solutions.

We would not want to limit your creativity by suggesting that any current design reflects the “best” way of doing things. The field of IoT is far from ready for any defining design patterns since we have so many suboptimal situations in both hardware and design, as the rest of this book discusses.

However, requirements and design problems across various types of system in the market right now have similarities. And we can draw from existing approaches in the interaction design arena to increase our confidence in drawing up these issues. ...