Designing for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is a hot topic right now, with it meaning many things to many people. From a design perspective, the IoT means creating a seamless smooth experience, where products don’t live in bubbles but as part of a connected framework that creates the customer journey. Simple (or binary) examples include Nest, Easybulb and the Apple Watch. More complex examples include Build-a-Bear (where the user builds their online profile as they go from stage to stage, you can find a walkthrough here). It’s the more complex interactions and digital touchpoints in IoT that allow a brand to extend its customer reach.

Audi London is a great example of using IoT to disrupt the car dealership experience.

But these are experiences that need to be thought through and designed – these actually create digital touchpoints within a customer journey – that is, brands now have more control on how customers connect to them.  This is why when designing the experience you must consider the following:

The devices – not just the ones you want people to use, but expect the unexpected. A user who can’t engage with you because they use the wrong kind of phone is not their problem, its your business problem.

Force-feeding the experience – process design, esp. with IoT is a user experience that needs design. A simple example is easybulb, a WYSIWYG simple UX on the phone changes the color of the lights, the ability to time mood lighting, etc etc. All create a simple (consistent) experience. Do not try to wedge your user into an experience because of the limitations of the hardware.

Expose your data to the user -  Your data is part of your IoT design, Nest does a great job of this by allowing users to access on their iPad their energy usage and provide recommendations on saving on their energy bill. Too often enterprises design a system of IoT with a misguided concept that the collected data is only for their eyes. But it’s the data collection that differentiates these objects to your customer. Provide use cases for them that leverages what the smart objects collect.

Its not just digital – Don’t forget the physical part of the interaction, face to face customer interaction such as a guided walkthrough of a kiosk is just as important as the kiosk itself. The spaces between your objects in an IoT experience are where most of your problems can arise, because you cannot predict human behavior. Work on narrowing those gaps for a truly seamless journey.

4 reasons most Intranets and Employee Portals fail

Intranets have evolved beyond the need for document repositories we saw in the 2000s. The Intranet has become what it always conspired to be – a true work tool employees can use to be more effective and drive greater results for an enterprise.

But most attempts at portals, whether it’s used as a source of communication, or a brand resource library, fail spectacularly. Here are some common reasons portals don’t live up to their potential.

Excluding the end user from the process- Portals are underestimated in what they can do and how they can improve organizational effectiveness. This leads to a portal which is forced upon users and adoption suffers as a result. Ensure your users are interviewed, their requirements are addressed, and they get to review design artefacts such as wireframes, visual designs etc. This does two things: the design becomes better, but more importantly it guarantees wide-spread adoption.

Avoiding the power of social – Most enterprises want to empower their employees but a common pushback is when anything social is encouraged – the concern is that the client will have to moderate and pull down inappropriate behavior. But getting back to point 1, about incorporating your users into the process, it's important to understand that trusting your employees to use social professionally is an important aspect of successful adoption – your employees were hired for a reason, let them use the tools to be effective.

Ownership - It is very important that the Intranet is owned internally by the client, and by the right person. If for example the portal is used to manage a CRM aspect to the business, Customer Relations should own it, if its for Internal Communications, Corporate Affairs is the right choice. Identifying early who owns the Portal is the most important first step in delivering a successful project.

Physicians are terrible patients – Often enterprises attempt to define the user requirements internally and outsource the visual design; often due to portals being seen as low level projects because of a lack of understanding of their true potential. What happens is a consensus, light, opinion on what’s right for the employees rather than a deeper, objective understanding. Fellow employees internally designing a work tool tend not to think beyond the scope of the knowledge of their work environment. Choose a vendor who can act as your collaborative partner, enhance your vision, and execute well.

Inserting design into the DNA of your company

Many clients ask our design team on ways of inserting design into their product based companies. Many companies tack on design rather than take a deeper look on how to leverage it. But this isn’t quite the right strategy, and this tactic is often used because they see their competitors doing it.

Why do I need design as part of my company DNA?

If you sell a product, or a service, design matters. If you have a customer interaction with your employees, design matters. The best design is the one you don’t see – the feel of a well crafted car, a checkout at an airline that’s seamless, calling a customer service center that doesn’t frustrate you – design ensures that every experience or touchpoint you have as an enterprise is delightful, smooth, engaging and builds your brand. Steve Jobs was asked how he was going to bring Apple back to its former glory when he returned as CEO – the answer he presented to the board : I’m going to use design. You want more customers, or happier employees, or a stronger brand – you use design. This is why McKinsey consultancy now has a design arm, or why Capital One partners acquired Adaptive Path. They understand the value and ROI design brings to their company. But like any merger, integration is the key.

But what does design actually mean?

Design isn’t just pretty pictures. It isn’t about explaining the difference between a UX and UI designer (which I will save for another post). Design is a philosophy that must be woven into the fabric of your company in order to grow and evolve your company into something greater. Design is an attitude – wanting to create beautiful, elegant products that people not only find useful, but love to use. Design can also impact beyond the physical (product design) through to the digital (interaction design) to the more ephemeral feeling of a smooth process (system design). It makes things better, stronger, elevated.

You’re convinced, so how do you get design into the company. There are a couple of simple steps that can bring a new mix of energy into your company to evolve your business plan.

Do a design prototype (you can find more information about that here). Doing beautiful visual concepts of a high value piece and then placing on a device gives the feel of the designed experience, and begins to change the conversation. Its low-cost, visionary, and excites people. Design is an opportunity to overcome preconceived roadblocks – it’s a problem solving discipline that reveals the real potential of your business.

Present the value of design to the executive team – A pretty bold move, but you must explain a hard return of putting design in place. Examples can include comparative results with a similar company that uses design, cost-benefit analysis, etc. Cultural change must come from the top so executives need to be bought-in.

Design externally first, in order to create the change internally – what this means is that by redesigning highly visible touch-points such as your logo, brand, website you can effectively rejuvenate the company and build excitement for design as part of the company. This can be done with an external vendor, but ensure that vendor is a partner who can train your team on how to use the design process to their advantage.

Either become, or hire, an executive dedicated to a design position, with an equal vote in the direction of the company. One mistake large companies do is have the Head of Design report to a CIO or a CMO, but this relegates design to only one section of the company, not across the entire organization. C level design officers make a statement not only to your customers and to your employees, but act as an an incentive to create the change required, rather than default to another skill-set (I highly recommend this book about the Design Executive) .

BlueMetal has gone through its own period of transformation, starting as a small technical architect led firm to become a full service solution consultancy. Design motivated that change and we can talk with you in detail on how we did it. It wasn’t always easy, but the results have been outstanding for our business. We often partner with clients to not just execute on a highly visible project internally, but to help mentor that client on ways to get design part of their culture. For further details contact horganjames@gmail.com

Is the Laptop dead?

Back in late 2009/2010 before the launch of the first iPad I did a series of articles on what the design could potentially be (you can find my concepts before the launch here, a feature wishlist, and a discussion on whether the iPad should have a stylus). As a side note you can also read my scarily accurate prediction of TV which we will discuss in my next post on the Internet of Things.

After the 2010 launch I was disappointed in the iPad (essentially a large iPhone) but today I am little more excited as the iPad Pro edges its way to fully replacing the laptop. Though there are some flaws – a pencil that sticks out perpendicular to your tablet when charging presents an ergonomic problem – it’s a step in the right direction.

I initially hypothesized that the iPad would be essentially a MacBook pro without a keyboard, and slowly but surely the iPad Pro is becoming that original concept, 5 years later.  So does that mean the death knell for the MacBook for the average user? I believe so, but some other things need to happen culturally before we start adapting tablets as laptops:

iOS replacing OSX – or in general, the majority of users not needing an OS at all. Many tasks traditionally done on laptops: reports, word doc, browsing, can all be done on a tablet – but there is a psychologically barrier of a generation letting go of the archaic concept of files, folders, etc. and letting everything be in the cloud. Expect the MacBook to be a backup drive for most folks who do not require a heavy CPU for the majority of their tasks. The follow through feature between iPad and MacBook certainly helps that transition.

A redesigned experience – not just visually, but more from the UX. The advantage of a laptop OS is the applications within easy (but not invasive) reach, and the ability to have multiple windows. This type of paradigm should be possible in the iOS world but requires a rethink in order for users to experience both the mouse driven and touch experience when the Pro is docked/undocked. And in landscape or portrait mode, the experience must be seamless.

Perception of professionalism – this is the reality, if people see you on a tablet, they just assume you are watching a movie or playing a game. It’s a weird catch 22 which has held the iPad within the grasp of  a traditional laptop, never being seen as a work tool in its own right, but a periphery. The 3rd device that Steve Jobs originally pitched has become a legacy which now hurting its evolution. Certainly offering themes in iOS for the professional rather than the default candy color icons might be a step in the right direction.

Where’s my mouse?  You simply cannot beat the mouse for precision pointing and clicking on a user experience. Its that last bastion of comfort that business professionals need to start viewing the iPad as a meaningful enterprise device.

There have been a few attempts for this integrated tablet/laptop experience that uses apps and a browser to function, not a desktop – the Chromebook, the Surface – but each one has not been a hit the way the iPad Pro potentially could be if its takes the next step in evolution.

Data Visualization Tips

With data aggregation becoming easier and faster, professionals have to be able to make decisions rapidly. Problems arise in the analysis and display of data, where some insights can be missed. When visualizing your data, three things should be considered:

Less is more: Often the instinct is that once we’ve gathered all the data, it's important to show ALL of it. But understanding the context of what you’re seeing, coupled with the context of the needs of the the person viewing the data, is vital to design a visualization that gives powerful insights. A great example is our work with an energy company. The instruction from the operators who were viewing this data on a wallboard (or digital wall) was: "it needs to be red, green and yellow," which is a common statement when users are asked how they want to see their data. The problem is that a wallboard full of red indicators has an ergonomic component – its impossible to tell how to prioritize what’s bad and what’s really bad unless you have months of experience working with the data. Instead, working with the operators, we learned what was the key reason that motivates them to examine a piece of data in detail: deviation from average. So, we decided as a group that the more something deviates from its average, regardless of whether its good or bad (which is subjective anyway), the brighter we made the text. In this way, operators could immediately discern which pieces of information they needed to pay attention to and examine in more detail on their own desktops. In this way, we saved the operators time to focus on the items that matter and become more effective.

What is important to the user: Often, data is simply accessed, but not necessarily leveraged in a way that is meaningful to executives. Your data platform is something that needs to be designed by your own specific needs and what you hope to gain as a business. For example, with a financial client we worked with, we could have taken the typical route of aggregated dashboards for executives – make the dashboard look great and show the big picture. Instead, we created a visualization that shows the executive both the big picture and the details at the same time by using a ‘watermelon’ metaphor – something that could be green (good) on the outside, but red (bad) on the inside. Users simply click on what KPI they want to see the ‘insides’ of. This creates an actionable tool for the executive, not simply a passive viewing experience that gives a distorted view of health that lacks real transparency.

Connect the dots: A piece of data on its own does not give you the full story; how that data flows through time can tell you just as much if you connect the dots. For a news media company in the UK, we created a timeline of a piece of content. As the user swipes left and right through time, they can see how that content was shared or commented on and on which social platforms via which devices. This creates a picture of the newspaper's demographics – age range, gender, location, preferred device, and preferred related content. This not only helps create a more 360 editorial coverage, but by fully understanding the consumer through time, the paper now has a powerful advertising platform by being able to place targeted advertisements based on their needs of demographic, content, and device.

Our examples show the myriad ways data can be shown. By understanding the user, the context and  the story you want to tell, effective data analysis, and decision making becomes a consequence of good data visualization.

Note: James Horgan will be speaking in person at upcoming event in October in NYC, covering Data Visualization in the media industry. Details coming soon.

The Apple Watch – designed to be wanted

There's been a lot of press recently about the Apple Watch with divided opinions on whether it will be a success, with the biggest question, as yet, remaining unanswered: why do I need it? In reality, that is a question we have repeatedly asked ourselves with the majority of Apple Products.

Let’s remind ourselves of where design innovation started for Apple – the iMac in 1998

      

 This iMac served a couple of purposes –

• Remind consumers Apple is back
• Be incredibly distinct in a crowded marketplace of beige and grey computers (note how that is very specifically called out in the advertisement above)
• Change user perceptions of a computer as a ‘work only’ device.

The goal of this iMac was strategic – shock a marketplace filled with dreary solutions with something fresh and forward looking.

However the only thing that had changed was the hardware, the surface. Desirability of a well performing product was outweighing the ‘need’ for a higher priced computer. Similar conclusions could be made regarding the first iBook and Powerbook.

In 2000, Apple had another game changer in its new OS, OSX – a beautiful, truly graphical user interface that had some useful features attached but attracted users with its desirability to experience it over their ‘need’ for it. iTunes within OSX set the stage for the iPod in 2001.

The iPod matched ‘I want it’ with ‘I need it’ by highlighting how Apple’s strategy was to drive down the cost of a song by allowing users to store more on their device:

And yes, that was the font Apple was using in 2001!

This consumer rationale coupled with an attractive and NEW way of interacting with a product created a major sweetspot for Apple – form meets function to create the killer invention and transform an industry.

This happened once again in 2007 with the introduction of the iPhone to a market saturated with grey business like models. Apple created a demand through sheer ‘I NEED THAT’ pitching of the product.

Remember where the smartphone market was in 2007 before the iPhone – most people were not using one, most didn’t think they needed one, and the current products were squarely aimed at business users. Most folks even balked at the price and waited patiently until they could afford one. But the iPhone fundamentally changed the way we experience email, calling and to some extent, texting. The first iPhone was also a lot more loudly designed than the current one, a way to shock awareness of it in an overstuffed market.

The iPad announcement in 2010 was crucial in its style – while sitting in an armchair on stage, Steve Job browses news, images, videos – to show how the iPad is both a  downtime and work effectiveness tool for the person on the go. By presenting the lifestyle of the executive enjoying a high end product, iPad sold out in droves, mainly to an older market with disposable income hoping to emulate the Apple brand.

So how does the watch fit within this strategy? The presentation is a little trickier, with no real envisioning of how you would use it. There is no ‘lifestyle’ pitch associated with the watch, making It harder for people to imagine them ‘needing’ a watch on a day to day basis. The watch needing to be tethered to a phone is also an issue, as is battery life. I can make calls sure, go for a run, great, but have to carry my phone to get accurate readings? That’s an issue.

So why would anyone buy one? Couple of reasons:

1. It is gorgeously designed. Not many folks will need one but everyone WANTS to experience one. Watch envy will be the new paradigm. In the 50s and 60s, industrial design as a field of expertise was born out of the need to ensure consumers would buy more and more products. Because products lasted so long, industrial designers would use a technique called ‘inbuilt obsolescence’ to ensure consumers would always buy the latest model. This is certainly true of Apple’s product strategy – step 1: get people noticing, step 2: get them buying, and step 3: keep them buying by updating the design and engineering for each iteration.

2. Those comments about why would I need this? It’s too expensive? The battery life? Haven’t these been comments about every new product launch Apple has done?

3. The glances – this is key. A lot of people have commented they have not worn a watch in years, as they refer to their iphone for the time. But now you don’t have to take the phone out of your pocket anymore, or unlock>weather app> look at temperature to see what the weather is like, or know what stock prices are, or news headlines. The glances are paramount in returning user behavior back to simple, natural, gestures.

4. Choosing Christy Turlington, though a little dated as a reference, is a smart choice because she can project the lifestyle – the cross between luxury, fitness and family.

One disconnect in the image is of someone who is running through Africa with an expensive watch! Beautiful and expensive products are very much counter to the conscientiousness of the digital saavy  and 1% adverse millennial. This is why the lower priced models will be a success but the Edition models will be a short fad – gauche display of your wealth is not a current consumer trend.

5. The digital crown could be perceived as unnecessary, but it’s a cool way to explore a new technology with an old metaphor. Think how quaint the iPod wheel looks now.

6. The haptic (touch) feedback is HUGE, bigger than you think. You can now communicate with a person through touch, remotely. Think about that. It’s like tapping someone on the shoulder to say hi without being in the same room. It opens up a new paradigm in experiential design – imagine a watch that taps you when you need to speed up or slow down in your run, or a watch that helps the visually impaired navigate through a city.

7. The ability to know when to speed up, change direction, communicate with others using almost a morse-code technique but in a highly personal way. I don’t think that concept is fully formed yet, but the idea of a touch feedback interface opens up a new area in user experience design.

8. Above all its modularity in its design allows Apple to span the whole watch market from sports to higher end without alienating customer segments (though the Edition may cross over that line). Remember this was essentially the Swatch strategy in the 80s.

Here’s the thing, the iPhone essentially replaced the need for a traditional watch. Now the Watch is looking to reopen that long forgotten market and that’s probably why its tethered to your phone – Apple doesn’t want the Watch to cannibalize the market, in the same way the iPhone 6, being a larger screen, is now taking market share from the iPad.

The one hurdle the watch has is that it does not obviously eliminate or replace an activity to make our lives more efficient – the MacBook replaced clunky hardware, the iPod replaced carrying CD players and needing to change a CD, the IPhone replaced photo albums, desktop email, and a host of other items. The iPad replaced print and arguably created the digital magazine market.

What the watch could replace is the wallet. That certainly is a powerful and compelling NEED – eliminating the wallet and the risk of losing it is definitely a next generation experience and including biometrics and personal identification into the watch is a natural next step in its evolution.

The other thing the Watch does replace is an ergonomic one – never having to take out your phone from your pocket for minor distractions. We will find out how our user adoption with this new product informs further iterations of the Watch.

The watch needs the iPhone to work, and that is a problem.  If I still need my iPhone to go for a run, play music, make calls, scan a boarding pass or access a hotel room then the Watch has yet to replace anything and this could be the Achilles heel in Apple’s strategy. Expect in future versions that tether to be cut. But remember our original reaction to the iPhone – the battery was terrible, the 2G network was a joke, but our desire to try the product got us over those objections. Its that overriding desirability for the Watch that will see more beneficial generations of this product to come.