Things Connected is a programme run by Digital Catapult to help start-ups that use Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology to make innovative products or services.
Usually many IOT start-ups are born due to a need the founder faced personally and he/she are learning about IOT on the job. Things Connected programme encourages good ideas and help these founder hone the technical skills and give exposure on how to incorporate better user experience in their prodcut so they can pitch for investment. When the start-ups are in the programme they are given access to the Things Connected dashboard which helps them to connect and monitor sensors to the low powered network, which helps in prototyping ideas and test assumptions.
I was the lead designer on this project. My role was to find research insights and design the whole experience from users point of view keeping in mind business goals. This was a 5 months project and my team consisted of 2 developers and a project manager
I began the project with a heuristic analysis of the website and dashboard to understand what was working and what needed attention, including how the categories were sorted. There were a lot of issues about how the programmes were displayed and how their locations were mentioned.
The project consisted of two parts, the website, open to all, and a dashboard, accessible after registering to the Thing Connected programme.
I kicked off the project with broad research covering both the website and dashboard. After understanding the problems and opportunities for the users, I applied the research to improve the website and the dashboard.
I started with interviewing the start-ups in two categories: the ones that had applied for the programmes and the ones that had already completed the programmes. I interviewed five participants from each category.
The interview session was divided into two parts. The first part, a contextual enquiry to know better the role and job of the users. In the second part, I questioned them about the existing website and dashboard while the participants were using them. The point of this division was to understand the user needs beyond the existing solutions, and if they could be met through the website and the dashboard. At the same time, I also wanted to understand what was currently working and what could be improved.
I created a user journey based on those findings which helped to understand the problem and opportunities in a specific area.
The main problems were:
After the user research and creating of user journey, I studied how LoRaWAN™ and Sigfox worked and know their similarities and differences.
For this part of the project, I set up several sessions with the IoT technologists to understand what part and details of the technology should have been exposed to the user. The goal of these sessions was to create a smooth and easy experience for the first-time users and also for the returning users.
LoRaWAN™ is an open source technology and Sigfox is closed.
It was interesting to compare how their existing dashboards were and how they would be presented in the Things Connected dashboard. For this, I studied how they were already working in their current implementations.
To get some insight into how first-time users use sensors and to better understand how sensors are connected to these low powered technology, I build a small prototype. I connected an LED to a Potentiometer. Rotating the handle of the potentiometer the brightness of the LED increased or decreased.
Doing it by myself, I really understood what were some of the weaknesses in technology specially around copywriting which was missed in the interviews as most of the participants has used the dashboards few times and had failed to remember the exact moment in the use of previous dashboard when they had any difficulty.
From the research, I could identify a lot of areas that could be improved and as a team we decided to prioritise what to focus on based on the constraints of time and budget.
Feature prioritising helped us decide the MVP for this phase. During phase 1 the MVP was included only for development. This also helped in planning phase 2 and decide what would be built during that time. After the feature prioritising I created a site map with MVP.
I conducted a co-creation workshop with users and the IoT technologist separately. It was very insightful to see how the users understand the two technologies and how they comprehend the navigation and features.
The session with the technologists was also very beneficial as they helped me group few features in the two different technologies which I would have missed if I was only working with the users. Following these sessions, I created a Dashboard map.
I did some quick sketches for the website and dashboard and did some initial user testing with paper prototypes. I made changes based on the feedback and created mid-fi wireframes and conducted user-testing with the users/participants of the programme. We collected great user feedback. Among numbers of interesting points, a very valuable one was to make the process of connecting the device more simple by omitting some steps . This was done by pre-selecting some features which usually users would have selected. It was important to show the features ( even if they were pre-selected) so that the user is familiarised with them and can use them freely when they become an advanced user.
The project is based on two aspects
Here are some glimpses of few pages from the dashboard:
Here are some glimpses of few pages from the website
Below some screens designed for the mobile version of Things Connected: