DPD Summary
H1: What’s different about user experience design for the Internet of Things?
User experience (UX)
Human-computer interaction (HCI)
Examples of Internet of Things (IoT) are:
- Connected home technology
- Wearables
- Medical/wellness devices
- Connected cars
- Urban Systems
Cross-platform design
The User Interface (user interface) is part of UX
Designing for the IoT comes with a bunch of challenges, how tricky these are depends on:
1. The maturity of the technology
2. The context of use or expectations your users have of the system
3. The complexity of your service
“Despite the differences in form factors, users need to feel as if they are using a coherent service
rather than a set of disjointed UI’s.”
Interusability is distributed user experiences across multiple devices
The Internet (or cloud) service is when the behaviour of a product is generated by a program that
lives on another device on the network (a server)
“We don’t expect Internet-like glitches from the real world”
- When we interact with a physical device over the Internet, that interaction is subject to the
same latency and reliability issues as any other Internet communication.”
A typical IoT service is composed of:
a) One or more embedded devices
b) An internet service
c) Perhaps a gateway device (a server)
d) One or more mobile or web apps for the user to interact with via a mobile, tablet or PC
Code can run in many more places
- Code and functionality can be unavailable if one of the places with code does not have access
to the Internet
More complex systems/services can be harder to manage and are often confusing
The two most visible and tangible forms of design for IoT are:
1. The UI/visual design
2. The industrial design of the physical hardware (form factor, styling, capabilities)
,Facets of design in the Internet of Things:
UI / Visual design Most visible
Interaction design Industrial design
Interusability
Conceptual model
Service design Productization
Platform design Least visible
Interaction design is the design of device behaviours (closely aligned to UI design)
The key differences to a single devices’ UX design process would typically be:
- Specifying which functionality belongs on each device
- Creating design guidelines that span multiple device types
- Designing cross-device user flows for key interactions
- Designing multiple device UI’s in parallel
In addition to device interactions, it might include:
- Customer support interactions
- Instructional guides
- Marketing or sales materials
- In-store experiences
- Email communication and notifications
- The UX of software updates and rolling out new functionality
Platform design may provide standard ways to:
- Discover new devices and applications
- Add devices and applications onto the system
- Manage devices and users
- Manage how devices share data
, H10: Interoperability
There lies a problem in the fact that people have more and more connected devices in their house
without these devices communicating to one another: you have way too many apps, systems don’t
work together and the more connected devices you have, the more you want them to work together.
“CompuServe” of Things: nickname of IoT based on the fact its networks do not interoperate, much
like the first online services in the 80s and 90s.
“In a real Internet of Things, any Thing should be able to connect as a peer to any other Thing (or
online service), as computers on the Internet can do.” But right now product do not interoperate
Interoperability refers to “the ability to transfer and render useful data and other information across
systems, applications and components.”
The four-layers model of interoperability by J. Palfrey and U. Gasser:
1. Institutional Abstract
2. Human
3. Data
4. Technological Concrete
To interoperate on the technological layer signals must physically get from device A to device B.
To interoperate on the data layer the devices must be able to understand eachother (same language)
“In IoT, the technology and data layers equate roughly to devices being able to speal the same
network and application protocols (H3).”
To interoperate on the human layer the people that are involved in the exchange of information must
understand and act effectively on the information. (differences in language, culture, size of home, etc)
To interoperate on the institutional layer the societal systems that are in place must be able to engage
effectively around the system. (for ex. the need to negotiate privacy laws in different markets)
There are a couple of barriers that are in the way of interoperability:
1. Security on a Internet of Things can be hard since they are very exposed
2. Business models come in the way, since it is more profitable for some to stay in a network
3. Not all network protocols are good for all applications
“In Internet networking and the World Wide Web, interoperability is enabled through universally
supported open standards for network protocols (such as the IP stack) and data formats (such as
HTML)”
The lack of standardization exists at different levels of the technology:
a) Proprietary networking
b) Protocols
c) API’s or data formats
d) Client device end: the native app on IOS, Android or Windows
Problems and irritations caused by a lack of interoperability:
- Added layers of complexity with fitting parts to specific network devices
- User is limited to use devices from one manufacturer for things to work well
H1: What’s different about user experience design for the Internet of Things?
User experience (UX)
Human-computer interaction (HCI)
Examples of Internet of Things (IoT) are:
- Connected home technology
- Wearables
- Medical/wellness devices
- Connected cars
- Urban Systems
Cross-platform design
The User Interface (user interface) is part of UX
Designing for the IoT comes with a bunch of challenges, how tricky these are depends on:
1. The maturity of the technology
2. The context of use or expectations your users have of the system
3. The complexity of your service
“Despite the differences in form factors, users need to feel as if they are using a coherent service
rather than a set of disjointed UI’s.”
Interusability is distributed user experiences across multiple devices
The Internet (or cloud) service is when the behaviour of a product is generated by a program that
lives on another device on the network (a server)
“We don’t expect Internet-like glitches from the real world”
- When we interact with a physical device over the Internet, that interaction is subject to the
same latency and reliability issues as any other Internet communication.”
A typical IoT service is composed of:
a) One or more embedded devices
b) An internet service
c) Perhaps a gateway device (a server)
d) One or more mobile or web apps for the user to interact with via a mobile, tablet or PC
Code can run in many more places
- Code and functionality can be unavailable if one of the places with code does not have access
to the Internet
More complex systems/services can be harder to manage and are often confusing
The two most visible and tangible forms of design for IoT are:
1. The UI/visual design
2. The industrial design of the physical hardware (form factor, styling, capabilities)
,Facets of design in the Internet of Things:
UI / Visual design Most visible
Interaction design Industrial design
Interusability
Conceptual model
Service design Productization
Platform design Least visible
Interaction design is the design of device behaviours (closely aligned to UI design)
The key differences to a single devices’ UX design process would typically be:
- Specifying which functionality belongs on each device
- Creating design guidelines that span multiple device types
- Designing cross-device user flows for key interactions
- Designing multiple device UI’s in parallel
In addition to device interactions, it might include:
- Customer support interactions
- Instructional guides
- Marketing or sales materials
- In-store experiences
- Email communication and notifications
- The UX of software updates and rolling out new functionality
Platform design may provide standard ways to:
- Discover new devices and applications
- Add devices and applications onto the system
- Manage devices and users
- Manage how devices share data
, H10: Interoperability
There lies a problem in the fact that people have more and more connected devices in their house
without these devices communicating to one another: you have way too many apps, systems don’t
work together and the more connected devices you have, the more you want them to work together.
“CompuServe” of Things: nickname of IoT based on the fact its networks do not interoperate, much
like the first online services in the 80s and 90s.
“In a real Internet of Things, any Thing should be able to connect as a peer to any other Thing (or
online service), as computers on the Internet can do.” But right now product do not interoperate
Interoperability refers to “the ability to transfer and render useful data and other information across
systems, applications and components.”
The four-layers model of interoperability by J. Palfrey and U. Gasser:
1. Institutional Abstract
2. Human
3. Data
4. Technological Concrete
To interoperate on the technological layer signals must physically get from device A to device B.
To interoperate on the data layer the devices must be able to understand eachother (same language)
“In IoT, the technology and data layers equate roughly to devices being able to speal the same
network and application protocols (H3).”
To interoperate on the human layer the people that are involved in the exchange of information must
understand and act effectively on the information. (differences in language, culture, size of home, etc)
To interoperate on the institutional layer the societal systems that are in place must be able to engage
effectively around the system. (for ex. the need to negotiate privacy laws in different markets)
There are a couple of barriers that are in the way of interoperability:
1. Security on a Internet of Things can be hard since they are very exposed
2. Business models come in the way, since it is more profitable for some to stay in a network
3. Not all network protocols are good for all applications
“In Internet networking and the World Wide Web, interoperability is enabled through universally
supported open standards for network protocols (such as the IP stack) and data formats (such as
HTML)”
The lack of standardization exists at different levels of the technology:
a) Proprietary networking
b) Protocols
c) API’s or data formats
d) Client device end: the native app on IOS, Android or Windows
Problems and irritations caused by a lack of interoperability:
- Added layers of complexity with fitting parts to specific network devices
- User is limited to use devices from one manufacturer for things to work well
