With the smart home/smart appliances market continually growing year-over-year, there are aspects that need fine-tuning and speculation over which devices and systems will gain popularity. While product manufacturers have challenges like connectivity and cybersecurity issues to overcome, smart home technologies still offer tremendous economic gains if you know where and how best to seize them.
For smart home appliances to be readily adopted by all generations, their ability to provide hassle-free interactions is paramount, or else consumers will shy away from them and be on the lookout for alternate, easier devices. So, if you're planning on creating a new smart device, it is important to include an uncomplicated, yet visually appealing user interface (UI) that provides users with an effortless user experience (UX).
UX is a critical part of developing any kind of product that has a UI, including smart devices. Customers expect their devices to not only be aesthetically pleasing but have a UX that is attractive, informative, and straightforward to operate.
Products need an elegant and interactive user interface, much like websites and mobile applications. Users need to be able to navigate through the screen without any confusion, errors, or delays. Another important aspect that needs to also be considered is that the product will be operated by all types of users, including non-technical people. So, you must provide users with an intuitive UX so they can fully enjoy your product.
The goal of your user interface should be to ensure that the user's interactions with the device are simple, intuitive, and satisfying. An appealing and intuitive user interface having a great interface helps your product stand out from others and win market shares. Leaders strive to improve design capabilities by keeping in mind the user behaviours which are difficult to describe to improve customer satisfaction.
This is why you should always take an analytical approach to UI design to unlock the value of your product.
High-usability designs take users through the easiest and least time-consuming paths. Users should be able to find their way around an interface easily enough to achieve objectives without requiring expert assistance. So, it would be best to leverage a deep understanding of users' contexts. This requires you to cater to their limitations, which include their environment, potential distractions, and cognitive load.
As per Imaginovation Insider here are some use cases for not-so-good UX:
For your business case to be persuasive, you need a clear understanding of hard statistics when explaining to others the importance of UX. Here are a few statistics which will give you a clearer idea and shows the results of having a not-so-good UX in your product.
The pain points to create a great user experience:
Building a product that encompasses all these qualities embraces users as these products bring customer satisfaction. Boosts brand advocacy as interactive UI/UX keeps users hooked, and more people tend to like the product. This further leads to more products being consumed in the market and increases the return on investment (ROI) over establishing your brand reputation.
Check out this article by Erik Kennedy to learn additional tips on improving the UX of your product’s UI.
Lack of project team coordination: Lack of coordination, or even collaboration, between designers and embedded developers. After the initial design of the UI is complete, the handoff to developers occurs. However, if there is no coordination or collaboration between the two teams some part of the UI may be missed or simply altered during development resulting in the end UI not matching the envisioned one.
Built to provide a collaborative development environment, Storyboard allows development, testing, and implementation of the recommended changes (iterations) during the development process without disrupting prior progress, thus helping the project stay on track, and reducing time to market for your product. It provides a common development platform that encourages greater coordination between designers and developers. With Storyboard you can monitor your resources directly while you’re building up your embedded application, so you can be confident your performance is 100% optimized for your target hardware when it's time to launch. Its platform-agnostic development framework helps de-risks your project by providing you with a means of making technology changes at any point during the development cycle.
With it, you can add animations, including capturing movement and motions in a click with animation Record and animation timeline features resulting in elegant, smooth, and clutter-free animations. Using its unique rapid design import technology, the process of introducing design changes becomes agile, allowing products to be refined at any stage of development to exceed customer expectations and without the need to recode the entire application. Additionally, it provides engineers with a real-time display of what the final product will look like, where real-time editing of controls, layers, and screens is possible; hence, if you want to see how the UI will look, you don't need to change and recompile.
One of the most significant barriers to achieving brilliant UX is understanding how to fit all the elements and behaviours of a GUI's screen on the target board's memory. This includes image assets, animations, fonts, and the underlying hardware access times, rendering pipelines, and events framework that drive it all:
Internationally ranked #4 top direct-selling company in the world, Vorwerk chose Crank Storyboard as their embedded UI software platform.
Since consumers are accustomed to enjoying mobile phone experiences daily, their expectations for kitchen design and appliances are proliferating. Consumers expect their home product displays to be just as dazzling as their mobile experiences. In addition to displaying vibrant colours and stunning images, these displays should also be able to display animations in 2D or 3D.
But is it possible for embedded smart home appliance manufacturers to provide these anticipated user experiences in their products?
With a stainless-steel bowl, state-of-the-art blade, precision heating element, and an embedded scale, the Thermomix TM6 unites more than 20 different appliances into one digitally powered appliance. They wanted a GUI solution that provides their customers with smooth screen transitions and excellent UI so that the customers could utilize its different functionalities. Crank's Storyboard due to its intuitive interface, scripting ability, quick adoption and flexibility, met all the requirements desired by the Vorwerk for their world-class product. Additionally, it helped them bring UI development back in-house, saving on outsourcing costs. Powered by Crank Storyboard, the Thermomix TM6 screen features a 6.8-inch, full-color touchscreen display. In addition to exploring cooking options, organizing shopping lists, and creating personalized recipe collections, the embedded touch screen supports automatic updates over WiFi.
Vorwerk achieved all this within the stipulated project deadline through a collaborative effort between their design team and the Crank's support from the professional services team and delivered a successful product Thermomix.
We are here to make your job easier, no matter what you're trying to create. From start-ups to Fortune 500 firms, we've worked with renowned white goods, smart home companies like Vorwerk, GE, Alliance, and Emerson Sensi and delivered successful products. From design to development, and from prototype to testing, our professional services team will work closely with yours to provide the best simple yet distinctive UI for your embedded product.
To realise your vision and discuss the solutions get in touch with our professional services team now.