Preface
My grandfather could probably have told you how many electric motors he owned. There was one in the car, one in the fridge, one in his drill and so on.
My father, when I was a child, might have struggled to list all the motors he owned (how many, exactly, are in a car?) but could have told you how many devices were in the house that had a chip in.
Today, I have no idea how many devices I own with a chip, but I could tell you how many have a network connection. And I doubt my children will know that, in their turn.
—BENEDICT EVANS[1]
From “Internet of Things” to “Connected Products”
Most of you who are old enough to be reading this book will have first experienced the Internet on a personal computer (PC). Going online was a special activity, done sitting down at a desk. In time, computers became smaller and more portable. Since early 2014, mobile Internet usage has outstripped that on PCs.[2] Most of us carry at least one Internet device with us all the time. The services and content it provides us are an intrinsic part of the fabric of daily life. But still, mostly, it is something we look at through glowing rectangular screens. That is now changing.
As I write, analysts are engaged in a PR race to forecast ever larger numbers of devices on the Internet, from Gartner’s 26 billion devices by 2020 to Ericsson’s 50 billion by the same year.[3],[4]
Technology pioneer Kevin Ashton coined the term “Internet of Things” in 1999, while proposing supply chain management improvements to his then employer, Procter & Gamble. Using radio-frequency identification (RFID) to identify and track products automatically would save a huge amount of human work entering data into computers. Ashton saw this as part of a paradigm shift from computers learning about the world entirely from data originated by people, to being able to gather their own data:
If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best. The Internet of Things has the potential to change the world, just as the Internet did. Maybe even more so.[5]
These days, the term “Internet of Things” (or IoT) is commonly used to encompass a much broader spectrum of technology. IoT now does not just mean things that can be identified, but things with onboard computation, network connections, and the power to sense the environment and act on the physical world—sometimes even autonomously.
As a label, IoT isn’t perfect. It says nothing of the people who are also a fundamental part of the network.[6] It suggests that this is a new type of Internet, rather than an important extension of the Internet we already have. Some in the field prefer alternative terms with different shades of meaning, such as “ubiquitous computing/ubicomp,” “pervasive computing,” “connected devices,” “smart objects,” “programmable world,” “Web of Things,” or the “Internet of Everything.”
In this book, we’ll skip the debate and use the term “IoT” for pragmatic reasons. It has the most traction in the commercial world. In time, the term will probably fade from favor, but the technology will continue to develop. One day, we will consider connected devices to be part of the mainstream Internet, if not just the fabric of the world. They won’t need a special label.
But IoT is technology, and technology is not (in our view) an end in itself. What is important to us as designers is how we can use IoT technology to create things that people need, want, and value. Therefore, this book is titled Designing Connected Products. We use “products” to refer to both physical things and software services: in IoT, the two are inseparable.
The Design Challenge
For a long time, much of the discourse around IoT was about hardware hacking, or industrial M2M. The maker movement is empowering people who may not have previously worked with hardware to create their own prototypes with more and more accessible kits, such as Arduino.[7] And grand-scale industrial solutions, such as sensor networks for logistics, agriculture, and environmental monitoring are promising greater efficiency and cost saving for big business.
Somewhere in between those two, the quotidian business of making fully realized, everyday products for consumers felt as if it wasn’t really getting the same kind of attention. That’s now changed. There are connected thermostats, door locks, drinking cups, fitness monitors, baby sleepsuits, garden sprinklers, catflaps... and on it goes.
There are standout products, but doing good design for IoT is arguably more complex than doing good web service design. Some of this is to do with the current state of the technology. Some of this reflects our as-yet immature understanding of what makes a compelling consumer IoT value proposition.[8] Some of this is to do with the fact that there are more aspects of design to consider, and tackling them independently creates an incoherent user experience (UX).
IoT is a highly technology-driven field and to date, much of the focus has been around solving connectivity challenges. But as the technology matures, we need to ask ourselves what we want to make from it, and how we should make it. Right now, we often struggle just to imagine what we can use it for. Understanding how to create compelling and usable everyday products and services will be crucial to success—but challenging. This book can’t tell you all the answers, but it is intended to help you contribute to the development of the field of consumer IoT design.
Why Did I Write This Book?
The first aim of this book was to provide a common framework for thinking about design for IoT, setting out the different aspects of the user experience that need to be considered and showing how they fit together.
IoT design is often thought about as a mix of industrial design and app UI. Those are important, but they are only part of the picture. You could create a beautiful app, and a stunning piece of hardware, and users could still have a terrible experience.
I wanted to show that UX is different when interactions are spread across multiple devices. I wanted to show that infusing the real world with the quirks of the network may sometimes feel very weird. I wanted to show that even quite simple connected products are conceptually more complex than nonconnected ones. And I wanted to repeat an obvious point that is far from unique to IoT, but that is often forgotten in the gold rush of a new technology: that you can’t make a great design if you don’t have a great value proposition.
We need a shared understanding of the challenges we may run into, and a common vocabulary for discussing them so that when we use the word “design,” we’re talking about the same things.
The second aim of this book is to introduce the inherent challenges of designing for IoT and give the reader a decent grounding in the technical and human reasons those challenges exist. Some of these technical challenges in particular may come as a surprise to designers accustomed to working with “conventional” Internet devices.
Third, I wanted to write a practical book—the type of book I looked for when I started working in this space, but couldn’t find.
There have been some great theoretical books about connected things in the world. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read Adam Greenfield’s Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing[9] and Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things.[10] Both are old in Internet years now, but will make you think deeply and critically about what connected products can and should do—and what they should not do. Mike Kuniavsky’s Smart Things[11] was the first practitioner book to bridge theory with design process. Adrian McEwen and Hakim Cassimally’s Designing the Internet of Things[12] provides a great primer on creating a hardware product as a maker or startup. But there seemed to be an opportunity to go into depth on the practicalities for user experience design for commercial consumer products.
This is not a cookbook, nor a set of methods. A lot of our current design methods aren’t well suited to the complexity of interconnected systems and they’re going to need to evolve. It’s far too early to set out a process you can follow from end to end that will unfailingly generate a fantastic product. In my view, that’s far too simplistic an approach to design anyway. This book can’t tell you what to do. But we hope it will be able to help you define and solve your own design challenges. We look forward to watching new breakthroughs in design ideas and methods emerge in this field. We hope you will contribute some of them.
As with any technology book, the examples will date quite quickly. But many of the challenges will be with us for some time to come. In this book, we have tried to derive general principles that will stand you in good stead for the time being, even as the technology evolves and new products and platforms appear.
Why Is It About Consumers?
This is a book about designing products for mass-market consumers.
IoT is too big a space to tackle in one book—on the industrial side, each vertical market alone probably requires its own book. The authors’ expertise is primarily in consumer design. But consumers are arguably the most difficult market. They may not be inherently interested in the technology, as we discuss in Chapter 4. They generally have a choice as to whether they use it or not (unlike employees). We are still figuring out most of the business cases for connected consumer products, whereas the benefits of industrial applications (e.g., agriculture and logistics) are often much easier to quantify.
We’ve included lots of connected home examples because this is arguably the most complex context for consumers. Home is the place where there will be the greatest number of devices to coordinate. Home life is a web of social relationships and daily routines. It’s also our refuge from the world: the last place we want to subsume our needs to the demands of unforgiving technology.
That said, there are commonalities in the technology between consumer and industrial applications that will create common challenges in design. Some of the material in this book will also be relevant to designers working on industrial systems, especially those that will be used by people who aren’t technical experts.
Who Is It For?
This book is aimed at two key audiences:
UX designers/researchers (or UX-oriented product managers) who are fairly new to IoT but have a working knowledge of UX design methods. If that’s you, we hope this book will give you a working understanding of the technology insofar as it affects UX, and a solid framework for tackling the design challenges you will face.
Technologists (or technically oriented product managers) with a working knowledge of connected hardware, embedded software, or web/mobile application development, who want to understand how to make better user experiences. We hope this book will help you understand how technology can shape the UX, and equip you to create technical solutions that support good design.
About the Authors
Design for IoT is a big topic. It needed the expertise of multiple people to do justice to the breadth and depth we wanted the book to include. This book therefore has multiple authors, each with a different background.
My own background is in digital UX strategy and user research, most recently for connected home applications. Martin Charlier is a rare breed of designer with expertise in product, industrial, interaction, and service design. Liz Goodman wrote the book on user research[13] and has deep expertise in design strategy in networked environments. Alfred Lui has a wealth of experience in designing for health and fitness wearables. Ann Light is a design academic with a long-standing commitment to grasping the social and political impact of mobile and ubiquitous computing. Ann began as my technical editor, helping me detangle my thinking, organize the book and providing expert guidance on content. But after many conversations about the daunting social ramifications of IoT, it was clear she was the best person to write about privacy and ethics.
How This Book Is Organized
This is a reference book. You can read it cover to cover if you like, or dip in and out of the topics as you need. Each chapter contains cross-references to related topics in other chapters to help you navigate the book.
by Claire Rowland
This chapter introduces the differences between UX for pure software services, and UX for IoT. It sets out a model of all the different facets of design that are required to deliver a good UX for an IoT service. It provides the conceptual foundations for the rest of the book, so whatever your particular area of interest, we recommend that you start with this chapter.
by Claire Rowland
This chapter explores the technology needed to create the “things” in the Internet of Things: the different types of device and the technology they contain, how sensors and actuators bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds, and how the challenge of powering IoT devices has a fundamental impact on the technology and UX.
by Claire Rowland
This chapter explores networking: how the things connect to each other. It covers the impact of networks on UX in IoT, the basics of different types of system architecture and network, network communication patterns, and how API design relates to UX. It’s long and quite detailed, so less technical readers might not want to read it all in one go. But again, these concepts are quite fundamental to understanding some of the unique challenges in designing for IoT.
Note
If you’re an IoT engineer, Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 will be familiar ground. But you might be interested in the discussion of how the nature of the technology can affect the UX. If you’re new to the technology, we recommend you read at least Chapter 2 and the first part of Chapter 3 (the relevant parts are marked in the chapter). This will help you understand how the nature of the technology creates many of the UX challenges discussed later in the book.
by Claire Rowland
This chapter discusses the challenges of creating great product propositions: a prerequisite to great product and UX design. It considers the differences between tools aimed at innovators and products for mass-market consumers, what makes a good product, the need to build service offerings around products, and how business models in IoT may take shape.
by Elizabeth Goodman
This chapter shows how engaging with potential users can help you create successful connected products. It covers concepts and questions that can help guide your understanding of the audience, and methods and tools for answering those questions.
by Elizabeth Goodman
This chapter explores how to take what you have learned about your audience, and translate that into a compelling proposition and design strategy. It also shows how to avoid some common pitfalls, when business models, technical capacities, and user expectations may not match up.
by Martin Charlier
This chapter explores some of the basics of designing physical devices and what’s important when designing physical connected objects. It’s beyond the scope of this book to teach readers to become industrial designers. Rather, we explain the considerations that an industrial designer would take into account when designing a connected device, the process they might follow, and how this is different from software UX or interaction design. The intention is to demystify what industrial designers do, and help forge better collaboration between hardware and software designers.
by Martin Charlier
This chapter explores interface and interaction design for connected devices. Many of these can be used via mobile or web apps, but many also have some kind of onboard user interface. This chapter looks at the challenges of designing interfaces for embedded devices, the pros and cons of different interface types, and best practice examples and recommendations.
by Claire Rowland
In systems where functionality and interactions are distributed across more than one device, it’s not enough to design individual UIs in isolation. This chapter explores interusability—the user experience of interconnected devices and cross-platform interactions—and how to make a bunch of diverse devices feel like they are working in concert.
by Claire Rowland
The proliferation of different technical standards in IoT means that getting devices to work together is hard. Many devices are locked away in proprietary ecosystems because frequently, that is the easiest way to get them to work. Building on the networking concepts discussed in Chapter 3, this chapter explores the technical challenges of interoperability (and some emerging solutions) and their impact on UX.
by Ann Light and Claire Rowland
This chapter looks at the factors that make products trustworthy and safe to use. Connecting up products and services brings new challenges for security, privacy, social engineering, and the environment. We argue that we should consider how our designs impact others’ lives, and take this as seriously as we take the need for profit and competitive advantage.
by Claire Rowland with Martin Charlier
There are some key user interactions that are common to different types of connected products. Your product is likely to need some way for users to get the system set up and devices connected, access controls and data, manage devices and alerting behavior, and perhaps configure and manage automated behaviors. This chapter sets out some practical requirements and design approaches to address these needs.
by Alfred Lui and Claire Rowland
Networked, embedded devices allow us to capture data from the world that we didn’t have before, and use it to deliver better services to users. This chapter considers how we can make sense of the mass of potential available data, and use it to deliver better products and services.
by Elizabeth Goodman
This chapter discusses methods for developing designs for connected products through prototyping and evaluation, including lightweight methods for prototyping initial product ideas, experiences of use, services, interactions with data, and novel types of interaction.
by Claire Rowland
This chapter looks ahead to a future of complex systems composed of many interconnected devices and applications. It discusses the challenges in making complex systems understandable and valuable, keeping users in control without overwhelming them with configuration options.
Acknowledgments
We are deeply grateful to the awesome editorial team: Mary Treseler for initiating this project and encouraging us throughout, Ann Light (in technical editor capacity) for helping us find order in chaos, and Angela Rufino, Jasmine Kwityn, and Kara Ebrahim for making the book a reality. Thanks also to Helen Codling, Sara Peyton, and Dellaena Maliszewska of O’Reilly marketing for support with events.
Huge thanks to our technical reviewers for their supportive and constructive guidance: Andy Stanford-Clark, Matt Edgar, Jason Mesut, and Ben Bashford. We are particularly grateful to Tom Igoe for his ongoing support with evolving drafts. Pilgrim Beart, Simon Frost, Christopher Osborne, Pamela Pavliscak, and Edd Dumbill also offered invaluable help reviewing specific chapters. Any remaining inaccuracies are the responsibility of the authors.
We also wish to thank those who generously contributed case studies: Arna Ionescu, Matt Edgar, Parrish Hanna, Jeff Maina, and Adam Scheuring.
We are indebted to the many others who helped this book come about. Some generously donated their time for interviews and discussions, pointed us to research or helped us access other useful contacts. Some tested products and helped source images. Some are colleagues or collaborators whose insights helped shape the ideas that coalesced into this book. They are: Helen Le Voi, Gawain Edwards, Pertti Huuskonen, Alex von Feldmann, Martin Storey, Naintara Land, Mike Kuniavsky, Scott Jenson, Katarina Segerståhl, Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila, Jack Schulze, Denise Wilton, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Louisa Heinrich, Chris Browne, Patrick Bergel, Adrian McEwen, Whan Stransom, Usman Haque, Martin Spindler, Alan Blackwell, Saeed Aghaee, Simon Johnson, Giles Colborne, Paul Connell, Carson Darling, Toby Jaffey, Anna Kuriakose, Ben Stewart, Colin Chapman, Andy Hobsbawm, Niall Murphy, Ben Reason, Michael Koster, Anders Mellbratt, Chris Palmer, Adrienne Porter Felt, Gemma Brady, Jody Haskayne, Thomas Amberg, Jordan Husney, Niel Bornstein, Tun Shwe, Fei Phoon, Ji-Hye Park, Katja Egmose, Melanie Wendland, Hsi-Pei Liao, Nicola Combe, Kassir Hussain, Vamshi Lingampally, Jacqui Brown, Sarah Novotny, Catherine Mayer, William Gibson, Ian Brown, Karten Design, Alex Harding, David Merrill, Deena Rosen, Juliana Rotich, Jon Bruner, Venkatesh Prasad, Barry Fischer, Boris Adryan, Timo Arnall, Paul Backett, Durrell Bishop, Andy Budd, Jill Butler, Matt Cockerill, Sam Crosland, Sabine Croxford, Anna Jones, Freya Dobrindt, Jared Ficklin, Andy Huntington, Victor Johansson, Devraj Joshi, Lucy Kirby, William Lidwell, Tom Metcalfe, Andrew Nicolaou, Eduardo Aguilar Pelaez, Patrik Schmidberger, Matt Shannon, Olivia Solon, Denise Stephens, Matt Webb, Craig Wightman, Stuart Wood, Max Gadney, and Ljuba Miljkovic. Sincere apologies to anyone we have inadvertently omitted from this list.
Personal Acknowledgments
Claire Rowland: I could not have written this without the extraordinary support of my partner Simon, mum Christine, my parents-in-law Janice and Allan, and Kathy. Thank you, you rock.
Martin Charlier: For their ongoing support during this project, I’d like to thank my partner Freya, my family, and my friends.
Alfred Lui: I want to thank my wife Sonja, my mother Lelia, and my brother Clarence for their love, patience, and support during this project.
[5] Kevin Ashton, “That ‘Internet of Things’ Thing,” RFID Journal, July 22, 2009, http://www.rfidjournal.com/articles/view?4986.
[6] Although Ashton himself frames IoT in terms of its human benefits, see previous reference.
[8] Taking a high-level view of the products making waves on crowdfunding sites, you could perhaps view the state of the market as a giant experiment: seeking to understand what can, and should, be connected, as well as how to create value and profit from connecting Things up. It’s an inevitable part of this process that some ideas will be stronger than others.
[9] Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2006.
[10] Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
[11] Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufman, 2010.
[12] John Wiley & Sons, 2013.
[13] Elizabeth Goodman, Mike Kuniavsky, and Andrea Moed, Observing the User Experience, Second Edition (Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufman, 2012).
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