Embedded UI development teams often struggle with communication barriers, lack of visibility, and siloed workflows throughout the development process. This typically results in extended development timelines and overstretched budgets. However, UI development support software can help teams overcome these hurdles.
No matter how refined the development process, every embedded UI development team has faced the challenge of overcoming communication barriers. What would seemingly be an essential and beneficial part of the development process, the back-and-forth exchange of ideas and information between UI designers and embedded system developers, is fraught with obstacles in these key areas:
- Siloed workflows: Designers and developers often work in silos and in a linear fashion. Once the design is completed, designers often move on to another project and adjustments to the UI design then fall into the hands of embedded system developers.
- Unskilled task performance: When embedded developers are forced to make design changes, they are no longer “doing what they do best” – which is building the back end of the product.
- Lack of visibility: Developers often select hardware and operating systems without a full understanding of UI functionality requirements.
- Unclear parameters: Designers, working with no up-front parameters, often conceptualize features that far exceed the capabilities of the systems on which the UI will run. Creating UIs that are difficult or impossible to implement can dramatically drive up development costs.
Whether the development team is creating an interface for an automobile, a dishwasher or a thermometer, it is exceedingly difficult for UI designers to communicate the intent of a dynamic and active UI from the creative vision through its engineering implementation. This communications challenge not only results in friction between the design team and the implementation team, it also threatens the integrity of the end product. The reason: Design changes are an inevitable part of the process. As the team strives to match the original design intent with available technology capabilities (or limitations), the probability of errors increases with each incremental change.