ECE3501 - IoT Fundamentals

Module V: Prototyping the Pilot execution:

Prototype developing Stages, deploy real-time UI/UX

visualizations, Methods and metrics to analyze and convey
business outcomes, feedback and data obtained from execution.
 The prototyping

In today's competitive environment, prototyping is necessary to understand customers,

create a new market or attend to what has been ignored by industry leaders.

The big problem is that most engineers don't see the benefits of prototyping and are not
convinced that it is an effective way of developing and using a prototype.

NOW THAT WE’VE looked at the principles of design and the fundamentals of Internet
communications, we hope you are itching to create an Internet of Things device!

But perhaps you have a fantastic idea and are planning to churn out millions of the
products. In both cases, the most sensible approach is to start by making one Thing
first: a prototype.
 Why Prototype?
Making a prototype first has many benefits. You will inevitably come across
problems in your design that you need to change and iterate. Doing this with a
single object is trivial compared to modifying hundreds or thousands of products.

With the Internet of Things, we are always looking at building three things in
parallel:
 The physical Thing
 The electronics to make the Thing smart; and
 he Internet service that we’ll connect to.

The last of these is relatively cheap and easy to change. You cannot change the
physical object and its silicon controller unless you recall every item.

The prototype, therefore, is optimized for ease and speed of development and also
the ability to change and modify it.

Many Internet of Things projects start with a prototyping microcontroller these

type of prototype is relatively inexpensive, but you will most likely end up with
something that is serviceable rather than polished and that will cost more than
someone would be willing to pay for it in a shop.
 Why Prototype?
There is a huge pool of great ideas with no material to show for it. A prototype makes
an idea a reality and makes investors or partners confident by showing them that the
idea could actually work.

Creating a prototype can be a tough hurdle to jump because it converts an idea to

something that has value and requires some dedication
Most engineers understand the benefits of prototyping, but don't have a good grasp of
its importance and how it can be used to develop a better product effectively in a short
amount of time.

To fully understand the benefits of prototyping it is necessary to look at the process

from two different perspectives, the business and technical.
 Business Benefits
Provide value to the idea for funding. Building a prototype shows determinism and a
passion for further developing the idea.

To an investor, execution matters more than an idea. Having a prototype in hand shows
the execution and provides a layer of functionality to the idea.

Alternative ways to present ideas. It is always a difficult task to present the full picture of
an idea which typically involves trying to transfer information that's on your mind to
paper or directly to an investor.

Information can easily be lost when verbally described or written down. A prototype puts
the idea physically in front of the user, providing an upfront experience and helps
visualize an idea that is just too hard or complex to describe on paper.

Reduce production cost and determine initial costs. Developing a physical prototype will
help determine a detailed cost distribution that will be involved in manufacturing.

Factoring in the cost earlier in the development process will help with predicting
feasibility of the product for production.
 Business Benefits

 It's also essential to understand that a prototype can be used to reduce the cost that's
involved down the line in production and speed up product deployment.

 With a prototype, you can determine more effective ways of designing a product for
production and streamlining the product to lower the cost involved in manufacturing.
 Business Benefits
Getting upfront feedback . Prototyping will foster constructive feedback faster and more
effectively. It's always easier for users to get a better picture of your product by helping
them see it and feel it.

This will bring their understanding of the idea to another level which in turn allows for
you to harness more constructive feedback. This direct feedback will help perfect the idea
for the target consumer.
 Technical Benefits of prototyping
Determine design flaws earlier . Fixing design flaws will always be a part of bringing an
idea to product form.

Almost half of the costs involved in projects are attributed to rework due to design flaws that
were determined far too late in the design process.

Traditional methods of getting information from customers without a functional prototype do

not provide informed feedback

In the feedback process customers generally don't get the full concept of the idea and hence
will not add value to the feedback.

Identifying these flaws earlier in the design process will help gather solid requirements that
can be applied swiftly to the development process.
 Technical Benefits of prototyping
Testing your ideas. Creating a prototype is not only a great way to show venture capitalists
what you're thinking, but it's also an easy way to test your product.

Prototypes are used as tools to get through initial design flaws and give the inventor a chance
to see through problems clearly.

Having a prototype on paper or a 3D rendered model is a great way to get some visual
feedback of the prototype, but it will not give you a real world perspective of the product.

The prototype should be functional, showing off the initial goals of the idea for testing and
weeding out potential issues the final product may have.

Understanding product feasibility. With innovation and idea creation there is always a risk
of failure. The hard part is trying to weed out the approaches quickly and understand the
feasibility of the idea as a product.

A prototype can be used to narrow down the idea to a potential solution for a product and
make sure the idea is viable in the first place.

A prototype does not bring in revenue and is only there to hash out different approaches for
your idea so it is important to put in enough work to get an initial vision of the idea without
overusing your resources.
 Technical Benefits of prototyping
Streamlining the design . A product design can change
immensely depending on the type of materials used and
how it will eventually be manufactured.

A prototype will help determine ideal materials by making

it possible to perform initial hardware testing, and it will
help develop an efficient manufacturing process by
streamlining the design for specific material types.

A prototype brings this information to you in a short

amount of time and will help you better develop a product
to directly address the problem and the target market.

The ideal situation would be to reduce the cost of

developing the prototype by using higher level tools that
have a wider range of upfront functionality.

Prototypes are definitely great initiators to a solid product

development cycle, but there's a lot you can do before you
get into the process of creating a prototype.
 Prototype developing Stages
SKETCH:
There is a good chance that the first step you’ll take when working on your prototype will
be to jot down some ideas or draw out some design ideas with pen and paper.

That is an important first step in exploring your idea and one we’d like to extend beyond the
strict definition to also include sketching in hardware and software.

What it means is that is the process of exploring the problem space by iterating through
different approaches and ideas to work out what works and what doesn’t.

To show how you might approach “sketching” for the electronics and software, the
following example will help.

The Internet of Things design firm BERG invited techies to the inaugural Little Printer
hackday in June 2012.

BERG filled their office with a bunch of interesting techies and creatives and tasked them
with seeing what they could do, in a day, with BERG’s (at the time) soon-to-be-released cute
Internet-connected diminutive printer.

Most of the attendees focused on creating new publications for the Little Printer—a task
that meant writing server code to wrangle data working with the Google Calendar API,
spotting meteors passing overhead, and so on.
 Prototype developing Stages
SKETCH:

One Techie decided that having a connected device as the output for the system
wasn’t enough and spent the day prototyping a custom-hardware input device, too.
Called the Printernet Fridge - an exercise in seeing what a semi-automated shopping
list would be like.

From the design constraints (mostly how the Little Printer publishing system works
but also limited by the hardware to take to the event), it was clear early on that the
problem could be broken into three broad areas:

 The graphic design of the printed publication;

 The physical hardware to easily add items to the shopping list;

 and some server software to tie the rest of the system together.

Breaking the problem into these three parts meant that, initially at least, each could be
addressed separately.
 Prototype developing Stages
FAMILIARITY:
Another option to consider is familiarity. If you can already program like a whiz in
Python.

For example, maybe picking a platform such as Raspberry Pi, which lets you write the
code in a language you already know, would be better than having to learn a new code
from scratch.

There is an abundance of software tools to help display your idea, whether it's a 3D
model or a simulation of your embedded system.

The great thing about software is that any prototype is absolutely moldable.

It doesn't place any risk in your development, but instead provides the freedom to keep
streamlining.

The perfect software for a prototype should have the functionality to display the most
important aspects of your idea that was described in your initial goals.
 Prototype developing Stages
CHANGING EMBEDDED PLATFORM:

Although ease of prototyping is a major factor, perhaps the biggest obstacle to getting a
project started—scaling up to building more than one device, perhaps many thousands of
them—brings a whole new set of challenges and questions.

When you scale up, you may well have to think about moving to a different platform, for
cost or size reasons.

If you’ve started with a free-form, powerful programming platform, you may find that
porting the code to a more restricted, cheaper, and smaller device will bring many
challenges.

If the first prototype you built on a PC, iPhone, BeagleBone, or whatever has helped you
get investment or collaborators, you may be well placed to go about replicating that
compelling functionality on your final target.
 Prototype developing Stages
PHYSICAL PROTOTYPES AND MASS PERSONALISATION
Chances are that the production techniques that you use for the physical side of your
device won’t translate directly to mass production.

However, while the technique might change—injection moulding in place of 3D printing,

for example—in most cases, it won’t change what is possible.

An aspect that may be of interest is in the way that digital fabrication tools can allow each
item to be slightly different, letting you personalise each device in some way.

There are challenges in scaling this to production, as you will need to keep producing the
changeable parts in quantities of one, but mass personalisation, as the approach is called,
means you can offer something unique with the accompanying potential to charge a
premium.
 Prototype developing Stages
CLIMBING INTO THE CLOUD

The server software is the easiest component to take from prototype into production.

As we saw earlier, it might involve switching from a basic web framework to something more
involved (particularly if you need to add user accounts and the like), but you will be able to
find an equivalent for whichever language you have chosen.

That means most of the business logic will move across with minimal changes.

Beyond that, scaling up in the early days will involve buying a more powerful server. If you are
running on a cloud computing platform, such as Amazon Web Services, you can even have
the service dynamically expand and contract, as demand dictates

Case Study by the Student : Open Source Vs closed Source

 Deploy real-time UI/UX visualizations
What’s Different About User Experience Design for the Internet of Things?
User experience (UX) design and human–computer interaction (HCI) emerged in a world of
desktop computers.

But our experience of computing has changed radically in the past 10–15 years.

Many of our interactions now take place on mobile phones, tablets, ereaders, and smart TVs.

And it’s common to use one service across multiple devices with different form factors.

We’re still figuring out the best ways to design for new devices and experiences.

Interactions can happen in a wide variety of contexts, especially for mobile devices. They can
happen on a variety of scales, from tiny wrist-tops, to smartphones, to TV user interfaces
(UIs) viewed from 10 feet away.

Even academic researchers in HCI have published relatively few papers on cross-platform
design.
 Deploy real-time UI/UX visualizations
What is UX?
First let us know what we mean by “UX” and “user experience design.

” Many people equate the term with “UI” or “user interface design,” but they are not the
same.

UX is a holistic term referring to a wide range of design disciplines involved in creating

systems that are useful, usable, and pleasurable to use.

As the UX consultant Elisabeth Hubert explains it:

The user interface is not the (design) solution, but instead is the medium through which
users interact with the solution.

UX for connected devices is not just about UI and interaction design. It also requires
designers to think about interusability, industrial design, service design, conceptual
models, productization, and platform design.
 Deploy real-time UI/UX visualizations
How Is UX for IoT Different?

Designing for IoT comes with a bunch of challenges that will be new to designers
accustomed to pure digital services.

How tricky these challenges prove will depend on:

 The maturity of the technology you’re working with

 The context of use or expectations your users have of the system

 The complexity of your service (e.g., how many devices the user has to
interact with)

There are key differences between UX for IoT and UX for digital services. Some of
these are a direct result of the technology of embedded devices and networking.
 Deploy real-time UI/UX visualizations
How Is UX for IoT Different?
FUNCTIONALITY CAN BE DISTRIBUTED ACROSS MULTIPLE DEVICES
WITH DIFFERENT CAPABILITIES

The Honeywell evohome connected The GlowCaps connected pill bottle lid uses
radiator valve has a basic LCD screen light and sound notifications to remind the user
to take medication
 Deploy real-time UI/UX visualizations
THE FOCUS OF THE USER EXPERIENCE IN THE SERVICE
When we talk about IoT, we tend to focus on the devices, particularly those with
striking or novel forms.
But the behavior of the device might be generated by a program that lives on another
device on the network (i.e., a server).
This means that the service around a connected device is often just as critical in
delivering the user experience.
For example, the smart travelcards such as the London Oyster and Hong Kong Octopus
are often thought of as the focus of the payment service. But the services can be used
without a card at all via an NFC-enabled smartphone or bank card

Hong Kong’s
Octopus
payment service
can be used with
an NFC phone
as well as a
smart card
 Deploy real-time UI/UX visualizations
THE FOCUS OF THE USER EXPERIENCE IN THE SERVICE
If your service is the focus of the UX, you can still make beautiful devices but make sure the
service design is at least as good. And if the device is the hero of your UX, make sure it’s
attractive, usable, and does what it needs to do, elegantly.

Service-enabled devices versus device-enabled services (many devices and services are
somewhere in-between)
 Deploy real-time UI/UX visualizations
A Design Model for IoT

Designing for IoT will confront you with some extra challenges and complexity that you
wouldn’t encounter on a “conventional” (software only) web service. You’ll need to think
about some different and perhaps new areas of design that all serve to shape the UX.

There are many different facets of design involved in delivering a good UX for an IoT
service

It’s aspects of the user experience that need to be considered. For example, UI, interaction
design, and interusability need to be thought about together.

UX design at the platform layer will emerge as a need once you start adding multiple
devices to a service.

A stunning UI means nothing if your product concept makes no sense. A beautiful

industrial design may sell products in the short term but can’t mask terrible service.

Depending on the type and complexity of your service, layers will require more or less of
your time. IoT services aspire to extend over more devices and become more complex over
time, and the parts you need less now may become more relevant to you in the future.
 Deploy real-time UI/UX visualizations
A Design Model for IoT

Facets of
design in
IoT—a
good
product
requires
integrated
thinking
across all
of these
 Deploy real-time UI/UX visualizations
Summary of UX
In summary, it differs from “conventional” UX in the following ways:
 Deploy real-time UI/UX visualizations
The UI
The two most visible and tangible forms of design for IoT are:

The UI/visual design:

UI/visual design refers to screen layout, visual styling, and look and feel on a device. This is
the form that a device interface takes. The outputs of UI/visual design are typically high-
fidelity screen mockups. Not all UIs are visual, of course: for a gestural or audio interface, the
equivalent function might be defining the aesthetics of the gestures or voice.
 Deploy real-time UI/UX visualizations
The UI
The Interaction Design

Interaction design is the design of device behaviors. Interaction designers shape the
sequences of actions between the user and the device needed to achieve particular goals or
activity.

They also determine how to organize the user-facing functions of the device. For example, a
heating controller might have several modes, such as schedule on/off or frost protection, and
some hierarchical functions, such as schedule setting.

The organization of these functions defines how easy or otherwise it may be for users to find
their way around them.

Interaction design is closely aligned to UI design in the sense that the two are usually done in
tandem and often by the same people.

But interaction design is primarily concerned with behaviors and actions, whereas UI/visual
design is concerned with layout and aesthetics.(Just to confuse matters, some people use UI
design as a shorthand term to include both interaction design and visual design.)

Typical outputs for interaction design might include user flows, low-medium fidelity
 Deploy real-time UI/UX visualizations
The impact of latency and Reliability on UI
Latency and reliability can also affect design decisions at the UI level.

Take the example of a smart plug controlled by a smartphone app. Pressing a button on the
app toggles the plug on and off. This feels like an easy and natural metaphor. This requires
two UI widgets in the smartphone app:
 One to indicate state (is the plug switched on or off)
 One to change state (turn the plug on or off)

The obvious design is to mimic a physical

switch and have them be one and the same
widget. If it shows “on,” then the switch is
on, and touching it will change it to “off”
and turn the switch off.

However, network unreliability and latency can

raise questions for the UI design.

Does the widget indicate what you’ve asked to

happen, or what has actually happened?

The obvious design will be responsive, but may

not reflect reality.
 Deploy real-time UI/UX visualizations
The impact of latency and Reliability on UI
An alternative design might separate these widgets: so one indicates the actual state of the
plug and one changes it. If the plug is offline, the UI can show that the current state is not
known. This tells us the accurate state of the switch, but means we have to represent in the UI
the intermediate states of “off-but-asked-to-turn-on” and “on-but-asked-to-turn-off”
 Deploy real-time UI/UX visualizations
Types of Interaction
Our bodies and abilities define how we can “talk” to devices (input).Our sensory system defines
how we can “listen” to devices (output). Yet, the way we interact with devices has so far been
very limited.
Tom Igoe and Dan O’Sullivan of “how the computer sees us”: one eye instead of two because
we only look at two-dimensional screens; one finger only, as we input through sequential
tapping, which might as well be the same single finger; two small ears to hear stereo audio
output from laptop speakers and the like.
Igoe and O’Sullivan point out: “To change how the computer reacts to us, we have to change
how it sees us.”
 Methods and metrics to analyze and convey business outcomes
WHAT IS A BUSINESS MODEL?
A business model is the blueprint for how a business creates value for customers, and makes
money.
For example, a classic business model is the “bait and hook” one used by printer
manufacturers. They charge a relatively low price for the initial hardware but make money on
toner cartridges.

The model maps out how the business will make money, either from increasing revenue
(selling more) or decreasing costs.Increasing revenue can be approached by:
 Generating new business from new customers
 Generating more business from existing customers

And even a not-for-profit organization needs a sustainable business model in order to survive.

This definition brings together a number of factors:

 A group of people (customers)

 The needs of those customers
 A thing that your business can do to meet those needs
 Organizational practices that help to achieve this goal
 A success criterion, such as making a profit
 Methods and metrics to analyze and convey business outcomes
HOW DO BUSINESS MODELS AFFECT UX?

Business models shape the way users perceive the value of the service and the fairness of
pricing. This can make the product proposition more or less appealing.

Users will approach the product or service with a positive, trusting mindset, or a more
skeptical or even negative one.This sets the tone for the rest of their interaction.

For example, the major energy companies in the UK have recently come under pressure for
perceived unfair pricing practices.

All are rolling out smart energy meters, which generate data that can be used to offer
customers tips on saving energy and therefore money.

But customers who feel that prices have not been set fairly treat this money saving advice
with skepticism.This has a knock-on effect on the perceived UX of the energy saving service.

Issues of trust need to be tackled up front in the design, perhaps through presenting pricing in
more transparent ways.
 Methods and metrics to analyze and convey business outcomes
DEVICE AND SERVICE MODELS
In the traditional product business model, the provider charges once, up front, for hardware.
This is how we are used to buying, for example, cars or household appliances. For a long
time, this was also how we bought software.

In service models (of which many digital models are examples), the provider charges for
ongoing service provision. Music subscription services such as Spotify or storage like
Dropbox are examples of service business models.

A nonconnected product can be supplied as a service like a car rental.

The choice of business model is a balancing act between where the customer perceives the
value to be and what they expect to pay for, and what it costs you to provide.

IoT is new, which means that what the customer expects to pay for is not always a
reflection of the costs you may incur!

The key for a business model is that customers feel they are paying a fair price (whether in
terms of money or sharing their data) for the value they receive, and you are making the
money you need.
 Methods and metrics to analyze and convey business outcomes
BRINGING DIGITAL BUSINESS MODELS TO PHYSICAL PRODUCTS
Building digital services around physical products enables suppliers to apply novel
business models, more commonly found in the digital realm, to physical products.

Combining physical devices and services is likely to lead to some interesting, novel, and
disruptive business models that challenge our preconceived ideas of what it is to own and
use a product.

Business models we are accustomed to in the digital realm might make their way into the
physical world.

More positively, there are benefits to digital service business models. There are
opportunities to develop ongoing relationships with customers, understand more about the
people who buy your products and what they do with them, and tailor services better to
their needs.

Users are accustomed to (and mostly comfortable with) web-based services that capture
and store information about them to provide a better service.

The sensing and processing capabilities of IoT devices open up potential to extend these
personalized services to the physical world.
 Methods and metrics to analyze and convey business outcomes
what are the right metrics for every IoT stage?
Startup
At this initial stage you’ll be mainly testing your proposition and your technology. These are
both important in different ways:

Capturing proposition metrics reveals how the device is being used, so, for example, you can
answer:
 Did it get successfully installed?
 Which features are being used, such as which buttons are being pressed?
 Does it get used regularly?

Capturing technology metrics can reveal the underlying function of your devices. Some
examples include:
 Battery life and how it varies
 Signal strength – by location, by SIM vendor and other factors
 Application crashes and free memory

You should take advantage of your product’s connection to the cloud to capture these metrics
for easy analysis.
Consider using structured metrics, such as JavaScript object notation (JSON) rather than text
log files, because structured data is so much easier to pull apart and analyse automatically.
 Methods and metrics to analyze and convey business outcomes
what are the right metrics for every IoT stage?
Scale-up
At this stage you’ll probably be growing to thousands and then tens of thousands of devices
deployed.
This is the stage when the development mindset must give way to a day-to-day operations
mindset – from manufacturing to logistics to support to service, creating a well-oiled
machine that gets better and bigger every day.

The team must become efficient at constantly scaling itself – which we can define as
supporting an exponentially-growing estate of devices with only linearly-growing costs.

You’ll now find yourself needing to track more numbers such as:

 How many and which sort of devices have been deployed, where?
 Are they working? If not, why not?
 How many are running old software?
 Is the new firmware performing better than the old?

The problem, however, is that once you have a thousand or more devices deployed,
manually-kept lists – whether on paper or a screen – become overwhelming, so various tools
are needed to help keep track of devices, analyse their performance at scale and solve the
most pressing issues first.
 Methods and metrics to analyze and convey business outcomes
what are the right metrics for every IoT stage?
Enterprise
At this stage, your product will be starting to mature as a category, though still growing fast –
you should have good processes, clear ownership of responsibilities and a better idea of drivers
for cost and profitability.

To grow even faster, you may choose to sell to larger enterprise customers or through channel
partners, and increasingly they’ll demand reports proving that you are deploying devices as
planned and keeping them running well.
You will define a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) and track them to prove you are
meeting your service-level agreement (SLA), for example:
 A KPI called uptime might be defined as: number of devices working at least
95% of the time in the past week
 An SLA might be defined as: uptime >90% over the past 30 days

More and more people in the company will want to start measuring leading indicators –
measurements which predict whether we’re going to break our SLAs in the future.
By this stage your key company metrics may grow beyond just measuring technical delivery to
also measure service delivery too. For example:
 Energy delivered for an EV charging company
 Parking space minutes used for a smart parking company
Alongside uptime metrics you should also consider clustering – if you have multiple devices in
the same physical location then the question goes up one level.
 Methods and metrics to analyze and convey business outcomes
Why does it matter?

All of this process and metrics stuff might start to sound like we’re a long way away from the
original focus of developing a neat new product.

But they’re essential because in reality, many IoT companies are really hardware-enabled
services – they deploy products to deliver a service, and it’s really the service that the end
customer is paying for.

All the data we gather from our product in the field and the tools we use behind the scenes
can get us into a position where we understand this class of product and how to use that data
to deliver a service better than anyone else in the world – which is a very powerful position to
be in.

Just as Google can see everyone’s web searches, and uses that data to become increasingly
useful at search, so connecting our product lets us see how customers use our product, and
measure how well we are doing at making them happy, and feed that back into becoming
better and better.
 Feedback and data obtained from execution
THE IMPORTANCE OF EXPLANATIONS

While a picture is said to convey more than a thousand words, pictures never tell the whole story.
They cannot say “no”; they cannot give reasons; they cannot plan; and they cannot provide
feedback on how they are being understood by others.

It’s risky to interpret these artifacts on your own. They tend to be ambiguous, with lots of content
that is personally meaningful to the participant and not particularly decipherable to a stranger.

It’s easy to jump to wrong conclusions. What timelines, spatial maps, and diaries are for, then, is
to elicit richer and more detailed verbal explanations from research participants.

• Spatial maps help us associate everyday activities to

places.

• Timelines help people tell more detailed and more

concrete stories about past events.

• Diaries and usage logs help you understand what

your users do, think, and feel when you’re not
around.
References:
Slides: 4 -18

1. https
://www.embedded.com/why-when-and-how-the-basics-of-embedded-systems-prototypi
ng
/
2. Adrian McEwen & Hakim Cassimally, “Designing the Internet of Things”, Wiley,Nov 2013,
(1 st edition)

Slides: 19-32

3. Claire Rowland, Elizabeth Goodman, Martin Charlier, Ann Light, Algred Lui,” Designing
Connected Products: UX for the consumer internet of things”, O’Reilly, (1 st edition),2015

Slides: 33-40

4. above reference : 3
5.
https://www.iot-now.com/2019/02/21/93270-measure-growth-right-metrics-every-iot-stage/

Slides : 41 -58

6. Nasscom Chapter 7 materials