RESPONSIBLE IOT: 3 ESSENTIAL IOT DESIGN FEATURES
As the world starts to understand the potential value of the Internet of Things, new approaches to design and user experience are beginning to emerge. However, the use qualities of products and services, the foundational principles, and the specific features we design are facing more complex challenges than we’ve previously needed to consider.
We asked ourselves if we could foresee what the UX features were that would have to be solved? Now, this might sound ambitious, but we didn’t set out to try to solve problems not yet risen. We simply wanted to make an estimation of where we should anticipate bumps in the road.
This resulted in months of discussions, sketching and listening, peaking at The Conference 2015 with a workshop on the subject of Responsible Iot. We invited industry experts to give us their opinions on the subject, to help us draw up what has now become 3 features of Responsible Iot.
Topp is hoping to spark the conversation of what it means to be a responsible designer in the emerging age of IoT.
The following features aim to act as a starting point for this conversation.
#1 LONGEVITY
#2 TRUST
#3 VALUE
How do you know if your solution is actually creating a bigger problem?
Nearly everything in the world around us is about to become connected. The question is not if, but how this monumental connectivity of things, places, and behaviours will influence our lives.
In fields with long standing design practices, like architecture, and industrial design, considerations about a product´s impact beyond quality and price — such as sustainability, social impact, or accessibility — have been active discussions within design schools, communities, and the product companies themselves. These dialogues create an understanding of impact and affect changes in material sourcing, supply chains, and consumer awareness.
UX design is a relatively new form of design practice. And while we know that digital products and services can dramatically influence or alter people’s behaviour, concrete considerations for how to navigate the knock-on effects of interconnecting nearly every experience we have in the world around us are immature and seemingly nebulous to grasp.
Though it might be difficult to say what unknown consequences our designs have today, it is important for us to start examining our designs and practices now.
Understanding the challenge
For several years now IoT has steadily climbed up the hype cycle. Many are extremely excited about the field, but many believe we’re another 5–10 years out before we begin to see it mature into a productive and cohesive technology ecosystem (ref: Gartner Inc.).
Like similar emerging technologies and trends, companies attempt to become first movers and capitalise on the potential excitement rather than addressing a need. Unfortunately designing for IoT has often meant creating solutions looking for a problem. Kickstarter connected gadgets are symptomatic of this phase. However, as IoT matures into its own field, it’s beginning to run into new types of design challenges and opportunities.
What are the considerations, and approaches that helps mature the design practice for IoT? How can we turn them into actual solutions, eventually making IoT products & services worthwhile, desirable, and meaningful for people? And how can we stay mindful of the potential negative impact of our work?
THE CHALLENGE
The ability to rapidly manufacture devices and deploy new software features requiring hardware updates, have led to the business tactic of creating demand for new devices with intentional obsolesce. Additionally, well established things with typically long life cycles, like our houses, appliances, or even our jewellery, are being connected to software experiences which simply won’t last as long as the physical object itself.
THE FEATURE
Designing for longevity means considering how long your product or service is expected to last. Depending on the context of use — whether it’s a gadget in your kitchen, a component of your house, or part of the infrastructure of a toll bridge — we need to match up the digital and physical lifespans; or even understand the potential for your design to evolve or fade away gracefully.
Imagine living in the connected house of the near future. It’s a marvellous, smart, convenient existence. But when the connected software aspects aren’t able to be maintained in the same way that your physical home is, the value of that design is diminished significantly.
These considerations can also help determine an appropriate lifespan target that encourages loyalty.
What is the expected lifespan in your context?
THE OPPORTUNITY
Latent in the connected space are new services which can build upon, and re-enable older hardware and data. Business models aligning with longevity designs becomes an imperative.
CONSIDER
- What is the expected lifespan for products in the domain you’re designing for?
- What are the impacts (environmental and other) of disposing your connected product?
- Can you create more value for users and companies by supporting a longer lifespan than is expected in non-connected products?
- Is this a context where you should support open standards and connect to other ecosystems, parts, and solutions?
Nest, an example for longevity
An example of an IOT product that we suspect will deliver on longevity, is Nest, (the programmable, self-learning, sensor-driven, Wi-Fi-enabled thermostat). The industrial designer’s choice of material and shape signals an intended lifespan that is aligned to the amount of installation required. The software and sensors it uses may evolve but wouldn’t dramatically change the feature set if updated, so while improvements in algorithms will gradually get better, the use case stays the same. One of the reasons why Nest succeeds on longevity is not only the physical design, but also that the screen choice and design in the installed component is minimal, giving it a “timeless” quality.
When built-in digital components are too contemporary or short-lived design-wise, they are at a high risk of being outlived by the physical object they are built into. This misalignment leads to a shorter product lifespan. You can see examples of this in many home appliances with built-in screens, from refrigerators to home security dashboards.
THE CHALLENGE
IoT products and services for consumers today can mean that connectivity and sensors add a new type of smartness to everyday objects, and situations. Collectively, these new products enter critical parts of life and gather extensive amounts of data and insights about their users. While data is at the core of IoT, failed handling of that data risks a backlash for failed products and the field in general.
THE FEATURE
Responsible IoT design means creating trustworthy products and services. This does not imply dumbing down technologies or offloading the control of that data to the users. Rather, it is about transparency, setting the right expectations and getting buy-in on the offering as a whole.
Remember that many IoT experiences will be invisible to people, and will aim to add seamless benefits to our lives. It is up to us to be proactive in surfacing the qualities of trust, as it is difficult to expect people to do so in an invisible system.
What relationships are you creating?
THE OPPORTUNITY
Build trust by balancing sufficient understanding, reliability and relevant benefits for the user. Once genuine trust has been established, the offering can provide a new set of valuable experiences, without having to flood users with settings or running into privacy concerns.
CONSIDER
- Is the benefit you’re providing proportional to the data you’re collecting?
- Is it clear when your product uses its sensors and how it processes its data?
- Who should decide on, control, and be able to access what is being stored on your servers?
- What happens if your product becomes disconnected or runs out of power?
Disney’s MagicBand, an example of a trustworthy IoT experience
Disney’s MagicBand (a connected bracelet) collects information about its visitors to help enhance the Disney experience in its theme parks, enabling personalized experiences for visitors and enabling custom access to rides, hotels, etc. But Disney offers a high amount of transparency in the collection of this data and how its used. The relationship between the experience and why that data is collected is self-evident to the visitors
Products that deliver on Understandability and Reliability (but not on benefit) become dull, academic, or experimental at best. For example the “littleprinter” that prints out tweets. Understandable and beneficial products that are unreliable become frustrating, like a ticketing system that only allows users with (online) cellphones to buy tickets or doorlocks that are dependant on both your phone and the doorlock being charged and online. Reliable and beneficial products that you don’t fully understand become passive (but sometimes also magical), like an RFID tag.
THE CHALLENGE
IoT connects the ubiquitous and everyday parts of our lives. Getting it right is about more than adding technology to an existing object — there needs to be some inherent value in the experience for users. Unfortunately, most IoT products today offer novelty rather than long-term value.
THE FEATURE
Responsible IoT design requires awareness of all elements contributing to the experience: the object, the digital experience, and the user’s behaviours you’re impacting or enabling. While often overlooked today, underlying behaviours, routines, and habits help guide the potential of your product. Aligning the design of the technology and service with existing or emerging behaviours can expose opportunities to add conveniences, or even enable new value and desirable experiences.
What are the elements of your product offering?
THE OPPORTUNITY
True value is uncovered when understanding the interplay between all three elements: the object, the digital experience, and the behaviours you’re designing for — together they shape an IoT experience and its value.
CONSIDER
• Have you identified the underlying behaviours, routines, and habits your product or service should be serving?
• Are you making something that used to be simple more complex?
• Can the user identify with, and understand, the value you’re providing?
• How should you supply both short term and long term value to the user?
The Amazon Dash button, an example of a product delivering on value (maybe)
The product is tailored to a specific behaviour; acting on the need to refill household staples in the very moment that need occurs. The digital experience (the actual shopping for the supply) is separated from the habit (adding a supply to a shopping list) and the physical product itself is designed to be approachable (with a low cost and obvious functionality).
However, the value of convenience is so singularly represented in the Amazon Dash that more nuanced routines of shopping are obfuscated through simplicity. Price comparisons or discovery of new options are traded off. Marketing teams are no doubt aware of this, and while the perceived value may quite high for many users, it brings into question the actual user value.
Editors note: It should be mentioned that this product represents a group of IoT products that are debatable from an ecological sustainability point of view due to its throwaway nature and high risk of not being recycled/recyclable.
THE NEW USERS
A shift in how we think of users is an aspect of designing for IoT that we find important to mention.
With this new set of products, new behaviours will emerge. While most of those behaviours are yet to be discovered, one that we can see is “multi-usering”. Where we today often design for the primary, singular user of personal devices or service, this doesn’t strictly apply to many of the new IoT products. The new users will come and go, and the core user might switch from one product to another, and from one to several and back again.
By virtue of existing in the world beyond the screen, connected products for, e.g., the home will to varying degrees affect everyone in the family, visitors, and in some cases remote people and systems.
There is a need for designers to recognize, and design for the needs of many users who may have very different relationships with the product.
MORE CHALLENGES
The features of longevity, value, and trust are hardly the final word on what could be included in the practice of responsible design for IoT. Other candidates have been discussed, cut, or are in the process of being tested out with our clients and in our studio. We believe the one mentioned above the new users (how to design for multiple users of connected objects) or manipulative design (using ubiquitous digital touch-points to slyly influence people’s behavior) are hot topics that are worth considering.
Read about the designers´ intention and the background of the project on Topp´s blog topp.se/blog/responsible-iot
We really want your feedback and for this to be an active conversation, tweet at us, or send us an email with your thoughts.
ABOUT TOPP
We are a team of designers, researchers, product strategists and prototypers whose work is found in the mobile, automotive and connected home industries.
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These tools have been created through a series of internal initiatives and external workshops with design and industry experts.
We are currently working with other organisations and companies to continue to create a more formal dialogue for establishing what it means to be responsible with IoT within a more narrow context.
If you also want to take this conversation further within your organisation or company, email us.
