Chapter 15. Designing Complex, Interconnected Products and Services
BY CLAIRE ROWLAND[243]
Most of the consumer IoT products on the market right now offer a limited set of functions through a small set of devices. As we saw in Chapter 10, many don’t interoperate well or at all with third-party devices. This keeps things (relatively) simple in conceptual terms. But IoT is called the Internet of Things because our ambitions stretch further than this, to create interconnected networks of many devices, web services, and users. Your product may grow to interoperate with other third-party devices or services, or become a platform supporting many different devices and services. As it develops, the pattern of logical interconnections between devices, data, and users will become very complicated, very quickly.
Technical interoperability is a huge challenge in its own right. But creating a design that allows users to understand, anticipate, and control how interconnected services and devices work together is an equally big challenge. The makers of IoT technology are only just beginning to address this.
This chapter looks ahead to a future of complex systems composed of many interconnected devices and applications. It discusses the challenges in making complex systems understandable and valuable, keeping users in control without overwhelming them with configuration options.
This chapter introduces:
How systems become complex as they begin to scale (see It’s Complicated...)
The UX challenges of scaling ...
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