In the Warren Ellis story “The Lich House” a woman is unable to shoot an intruder in her home: her gun cannot contact the Internet for the authentication that would allow her to fire it. In theory, there could be other unexpected consequences of things adopting Internet-like behaviors. Imagine if you turned your lights on and they took two minutes to respond, or failed to come on at all. This could make the real world start to feel very broken. So there’s the potential for delays in response and for our requests and commands to go missing altogether. 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. By contrast, real-world objects respond to us immediately and reliably. But we accept that these irritations are just part of using the Internet. It’s frustrating when a web page is slow to download or a Skype call fails. We Don’t Expect Internet-Like Glitches from the Real World The layers of UX thinking required to create a successful IoT product: from UI and interaction design all the way down to the platform (see A Design Model for IoT) How data is at the core of many IoT services (see IoT is All About Data) The problems of having many different technical standards (see Many Differing Technical Standards Make Interoperability Hard) How what seem like simple systems can rapidly become complex (see Complex Services Can Have Many Users, Multiple UIs, Many Devices, Many Rules and Applications) How controlling distributed devices is similar to programming (see Devices are Distributed in the Real World) How multiple devices create more complexity for the user to understand (see Code Can Run in Many More Places) How the ways devices connect to the network affects the UX (see IoT is Largely Asynchronous) Whether we are ready for the real world to start behaving like the Internet (see We Don’t Expect Internet-Like Glitches from the Real World) How the focus of the UX is increasingly in the service (see The Focus of the User Experience May Be in the Service) The challenges of distributing functionality across multiple devices (see Functionality Can Be Distributed Across Multiple Devices with Different Capabilities) They found that none of the five major connected heating devices on the market in the UK offered a good UX. For example, the UK government commissioned a study on the usability of connected heating systems in late 2013. At the time of writing, the UX of many IoT products is some way off the level expected of mature consumer products. And even a simple task, like unlocking a door, can quickly become complex when it forms part of a system spanning many interconnected devices, services, and users. Less obvious differences include the effects of many IoT devices being only intermittently connected. Urban systems (such as air quality sensors, city rental bikes, and parking meters/sensors)ĭesigning for the Internet of Things (IoT) raises all the challenges of cross-platform design, and more.Īn obvious difference is the much wider variety of device form factors, many without screens (see Figure 1-2). Medical/wellness devices (such as bathroom scales and blood pressure monitors)Ĭonnected cars (which may provide access to smartphone apps via dashboard controls, engine diagnostics, and automatic alerting of authorities in case of a crash) Wearables (such as activity/fitness trackers and “smart” watches) Connected home technology (such as thermostats, lighting, and energy monitoring)
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