The document discusses the complexities of designing IoT hardware-enabled services, highlighting challenges in software evolution, security, and high upfront costs. It emphasizes the importance of collaboration among diverse team members and understanding user experience beyond just UI design. Additionally, it addresses the need for effective communication of technical functionalities and the balance between delivering value and managing risks in IoT product development.

1. Hardware is hard(er)
Designing for distributed user experiences in IoT
Copyright Claire Rowland

2. Hello
Product strategy, product
discovery and experience
design for IoT, hardware-
enabled services and energy
tech

3. What’s IoT, and why is it hard?

4. Connected products
Image: Philips

5. Hardware-enabled services
Image: EVEnergy

6. Why is it hard?
Software
Always evolving
Security, privacy and
interoperability challenges
Ongoing service relationship
Hardware
High upfront cost, hard to
change once made
Stringent design and testing
Limited post-purchase
relationship

7. Image: bulb.co.uk
“How frequently can the sensor
report data without running the
battery down too fast?”
“You forgot to turn the oven off”
vs
“You may be heating your home
when you’re not there”
>
Image: SSE

8. Tech Design
Business

9. UX for IoT is
not just app UI
and industrial
design
Industrial
design/
hardware UI
Software UI
System UX:
interusability
Service
design
Propositions
and business
models
Technical
enablers
(connectivity, APIs, data,
power…)

10. Tech:
Distributed systems
are different

11. Technical architecture

12. Connectivity patterns
Images: Canary Care

13. How could it fail?
Image: Amazon

14. Proposition:
Balancing value and risk

15. What user value do you provide?
Easier invoicing Improved building safety

16. What risks are you introducing?
Privacy/security Discrimination Burning the house down

17. Are you actually
solving the
problem… or just
creating new
ones?

18. Balancing revenue and costs, fairly

19. Design:
Distributed UX

20. Interaction architecture and composition
Images: Tado, British Gas
(Nearly) all interactions via
phone app
Interactions mirrored across phone
and devices

21. Consistency across diverse interfaces
Image: Samsung

22. Cross-device interaction continuity
Microwave is
searching for WiFi
networks
Which network
should Microwave
connect to?
————————-
Abraham LinkSys
————————-
361 Temple 2.4
————————

23. …and the spaces in between
• Latency
• Reliability
• Intermittent
connectivity
• Responsiveness
of cloud service

24. Effective IoT teams

25. This image contains user experience decisions
Image: Marcio Granzotto on Github

26. It takes a lot of different skillsets to make a good IoT product
No one person can know everything
…but everyone needs to understand their teammates’ jobs
well enough to know when to talk to one another

27. How can you facilitate that?
• Everyone needs to know how their individual work aligns with user,
product and organisational goals
• Incentivise people to collaborate and share, not do their thing and hand
it over
• Whole team weekly meeting: What’s everyone working on? What issues
are you facing? Demos? Questions?
• Work through key use cases as a team

28. Tools

29. What individuals can do
• Be curious
• Be respectful, don’t pigeonhole others: no-one can know everything and
good ideas and valid suggestions can come from anywhere
• Be prepared to think up new ways to explore problems: conventional
software tools and approaches might not cut it
• Learn how to communicate what you are doing to others outside your
specialism, and make the effort to understand the way they
communicate

30. Learn to ask the technical questions that shape UX:
• What are the parts?
• For functionality which impacts the user, which
code runs where (cloud, device, app)?
• How do the different parts communicate and
connect?
• How quickly and reliably will messages be
passed around? What could go wrong there?
• How often can we get the data (frequency/
granularity)?
• Help designers think through the ‘art of the
possible’: context, constraints and trade-offs
• Explain conceptually how things work, to non
technical people
• Explain complex system effects: e.g. what
looks like a low impact change on front end
may have large impact across multiple
components on back end
• Understand that many things shape UX, and
it’s not just UI design
Engineers:Designers:

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32. Thank you!
claire@clairerowland.com
www.clairerowland.com
@clurr