Designing an IoT Product From Scratch
The IoT industry is all around us. Many products today easily get “smart” as a prefix, which usually means they connect to a computer or cloud that processes data. That connection brings the product to the next level. All products don’t have to be connected, but when they are, they need to prove their point as users expect that they will get something much better compared to a traditional, non-smart product. At the end of the day, the biggest competitor to a smart product is a non-smart product.
The basics for successful products - IoT or not - are still the same. Within the following three chapters, I’ll try to explain foundational blocks. To start, let’s imagine that you were tasked to solve some problem in the form of an IoT product. Ready, steady, go!
Start with one-pager
First thing you as a team need is a holistic view. You should know where you are going and why. To do so, try to respond to these questions:
What's the company's long term strategy, mission and vision?
What problem are you solving?
What would be the benefit for the end user?
What’s the business case?
What’s the north star of the product?
Prepare a simple one-pager with all these questions and answers. It should be clear and understandable, but you don’t have to address everything in one session. Remember, it’s a process to get there, and it depends on many different factors. You can use various frameworks available online like the Value Proposition Canvas, Problem Solution Tree, Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas, etc. They all lead you to a one-pager showing clear connections between various questions. Humans are visual creatures, and that’s why this works well. Start with what you know and what you need to find out. The key is to keep your mind open and focus on a problem and user needs, not a solution.
Image 1. The north star will help everyone in the team to visualize clear concept of where do we want to be
To solve a problem and define the north star, you need to be aware of the company's vision, mission, and goals. So why not start there? In case you need to be broader because you’re lacking answers on what problem to solve, there are various research methods you can use to discover what is happening in your market. Signals and growing trends can give you more narrow choices to decide what problem and opportunity space you’ll tackle, and then you can easily translate them to jobs to be done (JBTD) for users.
Let’s say you focused on one problem space where you see an opportunity. At this point, your one-pager should be almost completely filled in. That problem you’ve chosen can be solved in many different ways. But it is essential to have only a few theoretical meetings about potential solutions. Use the time to focus on building low cost prototypes (sacrificial concepts) and trying as many ideas as possible.
One of those sacrificial concepts has proven to be very interesting for users. A company you work for also finds it interesting since there is a clear business case. You are defining the north star for the product and showing other stakeholders how this product will help move the company's goals by satisfying users’ needs or solving jobs to be done. Your one pager should be completed now, and everyone is aware of what is the end result. During the process, you are constantly aligning with users, tech, and business and updating your one-pager. Following iterations of prototypes will additionally define more and more details.
Image 2. From ambiguity to the final IoT product requires zooming in and out all the time while completing and updating your one-pager canvas
The process above has a million more details in each step. It’s not linear, and requires a lot of collaboration and patience. However, with this one-pager, you’re making sure that your company is investing in the right place, and at the same time, you are setting up your team for success. Constantly zooming in and out, reflecting where you are going and what you know to get there. By doing it, your team knows by heart the 'why' and the connected product's benefits for your end user. It’s also good for developing system thinking – a skill that will benefit you in all different ways. Anyhow, if you’re unaware of the whole picture, you’ll face many issues in the bottom two sections.
Keep close collaboration in fluid arrangements
The previous step is nothing new for industrial designers, interaction designers, UX designers, or product owners. It’s similar to building any digital or physical product or service. However, aligning hardware and software teams seems to be a new challenge for IoT companies. In theory, the solution is simple. If you want to make a truly great IoT product, you need close cross-functional collaboration and teams that are in love with the problem space.
“Connected devices in IoT do not operate in a vacuum and neither can the engineering and development teams who are responsible for their creation.” – THINK blog by IBM
Making a truly user-friendly IoT product is a balancing act between industrial and hardware design versus software and digital design choices. Hardware can’t be easily changed once on the market. Software, on the other hand, can’t replace well-crafted physical interaction or material look and feel. Digital solutions are more error-forgiving since you can quickly update them. However, both hardware and software can enhance each other when designed together. Every physical product should, in some way, incorporate principles of industrial design. Those principles state that products should be sensorial, simple, enduring, playful, thoughtful, sustainable and beautiful. And you should apply it to their digital parts too.
Reality is more complex. There are a lot of tradeoffs to be made along the journey. That’s why concepts need to be completed and measured from experience, tech and business points of view throughout the product life cycle. The best sports teams have experts in different areas within a lot of different tactical formations that can be executed depending on the moment and need. The same can be applied for (IoT) teams. Experts from various fields should work closely together, in fluid arrangements, with a clear overview of where they are going (see the first chapter). It’s not easy to arrange that but it’s the only way to make smart decisions and to keep balance between physical and digital design and development choices.
“There are several types of limitations you’re certain to run up against: What the current technology can do, what you can afford, what your manufacturers can make possible, how much you can outsource, how much time you have to get to market, and much more,” says MacBeth. “Sometimes it will be something as detailed as a radio protocol that will only give your device so much range. First make a list of these constraints, and then ask yourself if they are real or surmountable.” – Software is Eating Hardware by First Round Review
Image 3. IoT products must be designed and developed as digital and physical parts together
Think about your IoT product as physical and digital parts together. It will allow you to start planning your strategy much smarter. Then by enabling close collaboration, in different ways and times, between brand designers, industrial designers, UX designers, software developers, hardware developers, firmware developers, and quality assurance developers, you’ll be ready to build a great product.
Create one user journey
When we look at industrial design or the digital design process in isolation, there is less complexity since there are fewer places where things can go wrong. It’s easier to anticipate, take decisions and solutions for various use cases. While using a smart product, users switch between physical and digital interaction spaces, and that adds complexity to the design process.
Extra layers like LED, on-device screens, physical buttons, internet connection, talking touch points within the system, cloud, and all other digital and physical interactions add more nodes where things can go wrong. It means a lot more errors or edge cases to handle in a user-friendly way. It’s easy to design happy cases, but real experience thrives when we manage all the not-so-pleasant moments within the user’s journey. Remember that users are not very forgiving of errors and your smart product can easily end up disconnected at the bottom of a drawer.
With all that said, to make an excellent smart product, you need to combine both design processes into one. This results in many more use cases throughout digital and physical contexts to think about. The process becomes more complicated and requires more team alignment and patience.
The good thing is that every product and user goes through a similar user journey, whether physical, digital, or combined. By uniting these journeys, you will get something like this:
Awareness (marketing and advertising)
Purchase (physical or digital stores)
First-time setup (out of the box – packaging and manuals, assembly, digital onboarding, configuration)
Use (control and interact, get insights and suggestions)
Maintenance (cleaning, updating software, troubleshooting)
Manage (reconfiguring, upgrading hardware)
Decommission (repurpose, sell, recycle)
Help & Support (support in each step of the journey)
Image 4. User journey you can use to build your next IoT product and not miss to design key moments of experience
This journey is just an example, some things can be moved between sections, and you can make your journey by adding or removing steps. The idea is to list all steps and context-switching to see where and how your teams need to collaborate to design the best solution.
For example, you'll notice that help and support should be present throughout the journey since the user might need different guidance at each step. From online or in-store information before purchase, manuals and support after purchase, first steps while figuring out how things work, maintenance and manage on how to clean product or fix issues, to how sustainably dispose of your product.
You’ll also see that there will be a lot of touch-point switching. The user opens the box and skips the paper manual (or not). Then it is time for the device interaction. The device shows some LED behaviour, emits sound or vibration. In the meantime, the user is interrupted by something or someone in the physical world. Later user connects a physical product with another device that has a display and more computing power. User doesn’t understand completely what happened, so it’s time to go back to reading paper or digital manuals. After solving the problem, it’s time to set up and use the product. At some point the product gets disconnected. Is it still usable, or is it dead? What now? How to troubleshoot it? How many technical details can we talk about without overwhelming the user but still providing a solution? Physical device shows something, as well as the digital part. Again, switching between touch-points.
This story can continue with more details on the way, but the main takeaway here is that most products go through a similar journey and IoT products have extra layers of complexity to deal with, e.g.:
Minimize friction when switching contexts,
Align and complement interactions,
Align users' mental models with how the system works,
Support with first steps, when the user is stuck, or things go wrong…
Above mentioned topics are nothing new for industrial designers or UX designers, but they need to be designed and thought through together, not in isolation, for every product. It is only possible if all teams look and work on the same journey.
Ready to design a successful IoT product?
Great experience for IoT products is not rocket science or something groundbreaking. It all comes back to basics. With clear goals and value for users, a holistic view, closely collaborative teams, and starting from user needs, truly meaningful smart products can be made. Remember, not every product should be connected as it can solve problems smartly by not being connected. But when connected, it should solve real issues thanks to an end-to-end design and development – both physically and digitally.