Designing for the internet of things

Imagine a future where every object has a sensor, an actuator, and a microprocessor embedded inside of it. Tables will be able to detect what’s being placed on them, beds will know who’s sleeping in them, and clothes will know the internal body temperature of the wearer. The tables can dynamically adjust their height, the beds can adjust their firmness or angle, and the clothes can increase or decrease airflow in the textile mesh to warm or cool the skin inside.

Now imagine that all these devices are talking to each other and constantly learning your habits, always re-assessing and readjusting as necessary to provide you with the most optimal experience. We’re accelerating towards this future faster than anyone could have predicted, and we need to approach it cautiously.

Designers in particular need to adapt their skill sets to the incoming explosion of always-connected smart products and carefully consider how to integrate them into users’ lives without them being too intrusive or annoying. You wouldn’t want a pair of smart speakers to turn on when you’re humming a tune because a particular song is stuck in your head.

All user intents have some internal trigger, where the thought of performing an action is formed in the user’s head. This is the trigger that designers need to exploit. “Know what the user needs before they even know it,” or in this case, immediately after they know it. This removes the need for an interface and allows the product to feel like magic; the product knows what the user wants before their thoughts manifest in the real world.

Getting into the heads of the user requires designers to understand humans at a deeply personal level. Designers need to know what humans want, when they want it, how they want it, and why they want it. And none of this can be figured out by sitting behind a computer screen reading endless blog posts or brainstorming at a whiteboard with the rest of the design team. The designers need to actually go and talk to human beings in the outside world.

This could significantly alter the paradigm for the designer’s skill set. No longer can we hide in our pretty interfaces and proclaim that our product is going to be loved by everyone. We will actually need to test iteratively and improve our concepts based on our learnings. If even ten percent of users find the product frustrating, there’s obviously something that can be done to solve it. Accounting for fringe cases and still ensuring a good UX is part of the challenge.

I’m personally excited for this future. As the world starts to leap from mobile to the internet of things, there are endless possibilities for how connected products can interact with each other in myriad combinations and adapt over time to specific behavioral patterns tailored to each unique user.

Designers will be challenged to dissect and analyze each part of the human experience with technology and come up with novel methodologies to solve long-standing problems that have not had the opportunity to come to the forefront until now. If we’re all prepared for it and approach it with the right mindset, we all end up with a better future. If we’re not, we’ve still got a bit of time to sharpen up our skills before we enter the eye of the storm.