UX AND SERVICE DESIGN FOR CONNECTED PRODUCTS Claire Rowland JUNE Produced by 2018 Table of contents Summary ........................................................................... 1 Commercial factors: how business models and value propositions underpin UX ................................... 17 UX, service design, and IoT.............................................3 Giving users transparency and control ........................ 19 What is UX and service design?....................................3 Helping users grapple with complexity ...................... 19 UX and service design for IoT .......................................4 How it works, and how it can fail ................................ 19 Technical factors: how decisions about architecture, Ownership, and the right to modify ............................ 19 connectivity and power constraints shape user Security ......................................................................... 19 value and UX ....................................................................5 Data privacy ................................................................. 19 How does it work? How could it fail? Architecture and reliability ..................................................................5 Automation and algorithms ........................................ 21 Battery life, connectivity patterns ...................................7 Communicating complexity ........................................ 22 Latency and responsiveness .........................................7 Design methods and prototyping ............................... 23 API design and fit for UX................................................8 Making the right thing ................................................ 23 How does it interoperate with 3rd party devices? .......8 Making the thing right ................................................ 26 Distributed UX/interusability ...........................................9 Summary: planning UX for an IoT project .................. 34 Composition ...................................................................9 Ongoing user research ............................................... 34 Consistency .................................................................. 10 Prototype and test early .............................................. 34 Continuity .......................................................................11 Design for the system, and the service ...................... 34 From products to services .............................................. 14 Foster good team collaboration ................................. 34 Is it a product or a service? .......................................... 14 In summary ................................................................. 34 Why think about services ............................................. 15 The changing nature of ownership ............................. 15 Designing services ....................................................... 15 Get in touch: IoTUK.org.uk [email protected] @IoTUKNews IoT UK: UX and service design for connected products Summary There are a huge variety of applications in IoT spanning In this Insight Report, we’ll look at the factors which connected products and hardware enabled services. make UX for IoT particularly challenging. We’ll discuss Consumer products such as home lighting and heating how technical architecture and business models shape controllers are growing in popularity. Across many UX, and how IoT blurs the line between product and industry verticals, sensing, tracking and actuation are service experiences. We’ll look at the need to give users enabling smarter use of resources, just in time processes transparency around how complex systems work and and predictive maintenance. share data, in particular in relation to GDPR. And we’ll set out the challenges of designing distributed user All of these have users, who want products and services experiences across multiple UIs, and show how some which are useful, usable and satisfying to use. Mass- companies are tackling the challenges of designing for market consumers may have quite different needs both hardware and software in parallel. from industry specialists. But there are many common challenges in designing the user experience of products NB: we interpret IoT loosely to refer to connected products which span both hardware and software. and services enabled by connected hardware in general, whether or not they communicate using open internet protocols or have a direct internet connection. Claire Rowland is a London-based product/UX strategy consultant specialising in IoT and hardware-enabled services. She is the lead author of Designing Connected Products: UX for the consumer internet of things (designingconnectedproducts.com) published by O’Reilly. She has a particular interest in taking connected products from an early adopter user base to the mass market. Before launching her own consultancy (clairerowland. com), she worked on energy management and home automation products as the service design manager for AlertMe.com, since acquired by British Gas Hive. Previously, she was head of research for design consultancy Fjord, where she led EU-funded R&D work investigating UX for interconnected embedded devices. She has worked in UX design and research for mobile, multiplatform and web services since 1997. Get in touch: IoTUK.org.uk [email protected] @IoTUKNews IoT UK: UX and service design for connected products What is UX and service design? User experience design is concerned with creating products and services which are: Valuable/useful: they fulfil a genuine need for a particular group of users or customers; Usable: the target users can use the product effectively to achieve their objectives; and Engaging: satisfying or pleasurable to use People often assume UX refers to software UIs. But a user’s experience with a product or service is usually shaped by many factors, for example: The product’s fit for their needs How reliably it works How fair pricing is perceived to be Other offline or online interactions with the provider alongside the main applications, for example purchasing, order fulfilment, and customer support. Some of these factors are beyond the conventional Fig 1. The Elvie pelvic floor trainer from Chiaro Technology remit of UX designers. They illustrate that UX involves https://www.chiaro.co.uk collaboration between the entire product team. Even if there is no-one on the team with ‘UX’ in their job title, the The discipline of service design is closely related to UX. It product or service provides an experience to users. This looks at the whole lifecycle of a user’s experience with a needs careful planning and development. service, and how all the different components of the UX function together to deliver the service. It also identifies “We’re passionate about making products for women the people, infrastructure, communications and other that really improve their lives, so anything that we do is enablers required to support the service. going to be reflected in how we’ve thought about the user experience. And that doesn’t just mean the physical Designing a service is a team effort. Service design product or the software, it also means the packaging, it provides methods and tools intended to align teams means the manual, it means all the touch points, it means around crafting the best possible customer experience, wherever you’re going to see it in a store that we’ve from purchase through to end of life. thought about the point of sale. So user experience is the whole thing, it is the product, the product should be the experience. And the better that is, the better the product feels like a real experience then the better it feels like one product and not multiple things stuck together.” Ben Levy, Chiaro Technology: makers of the Elvie pelvic floor trainer and another new product due for release in 2018. Get in touch: IoTUK.org.uk [email protected] @IoTUKNews IoT UK: UX and service design for connected products 3 UX and service design for IoT Experience design for IoT products is more complicated UX for connected products is not just about UIs, but the than it is for software or conventional physical products. whole experience of the product. It requires a different There may be more customer UIs or ‘touchpoints’: mindset and approach from conventional software UX. perhaps multiple devices, mobile or web or voice UX needs to take into account the way in which the user applications, customer support, and interoperating experiences the whole system, as well as the detail of products. Physical devices exist in a real world setting, each UI. posing new challenges to tackle. For example, hubs in the home are often unplugged when someone needs a socket to plug in a vacuum cleaner, and doesn’t realise that this plain white box is keeping the heating or lighting working. Network connections introduce potential points of delay or failure. And the relationship between the customer and provider is not a one-off transaction but the ongoing delivery of a service. Get in touch: IoTUK.org.uk [email protected] @IoTUKNews IoT UK: UX and service design for connected products 4 Technical factors: how decisions about architecture, connectivity and power constraints shape user value and UX In a distributed system, there are many places in which is what the impact of temporary outages may be. For design decisions can be baked into code, from front-end example, some connected lighting systems – like Philips apps, to APIs,