7

Designing Ecosystems

Connecting Everything Together

I’ve been on diets since I was fourteen years old. I’m not proud of it, but that elusive fifteen pounds has always been a struggle. I’m very motivated to lose the weight, but just thinking about the burden of all the tracking involved—food diaries, exercise, and weight charting—makes me want to scarf down a Kit Kat in consolation.

Surely, a lot of this work can be delegated to devices, right? There have been scales, trackers, pedometers, and an entire industry of “fitness” devices that do this well enough for some time. What has changed, and what makes my experience this year so different than in the past, is the power of having all the devices connected to one another.

My Withings bathroom scale is Wi-Fi enabled, so I just have to step on it in the morning. Even if I’m bleary eyed and forget my glasses, the act of stepping on the platform is all that’s needed for my weight to appear on an online chart. For activity, I can wear a smart watch or rely on the phone in my pocket to record steps. Eventually, my bike or exercise equipment such as the elliptical machine at the gym will beam my exercise stats to the cloud. The food diary is still tedious, but if it’s the only manual tracking in the process, it’s less burdensome than having to do it all, so I’ve been trying to make it work, with some success (five pounds down so far! Yay!).

But the challenge remains: How can I put all this information and activity together to form one picture? Enter the weight loss service Noom. What’s making it all finally click is the power of a service that connects all the information, giving me an at-a-glance history of my progress and tying together food, activity, calendaring, and weight measurements. Rather than an individual weight measurement like what I’d always get in the past through a traditional scale, I can see a graph over time connected to a calendar, so I can look at spikes and make correlations between the number and what was happening at that time of the year (aha, holiday parties, you obvious culprits!). I can also compare my activity level with my weight and get a sense of how much harder I might need to exercise to make the number move in a consistent downward trend.

In addition to the insight I get from looking at the trends, the Noom service lets me set a calorie goal and then uses the data from the fitness trackers to automatically increase my food budget when I do extra activity. If I work hard enough, I can earn that ice cream (yes!). And where it gets even more powerful is the ability to connect with other people online, so the service has set me up with a coach who offers advice based on my data and a support group that I can share it all with. So now there really are no excuses left for that last ten pounds.

Ecosystems Are Social

We have looked at many aspects of the character and behavior of products themselves—the core product architecture, its ability to express itself, how it uses sensor systems to interact, and its sensitivity to context. These days, pretty much any product that tracks and generates data is connected to the cloud, and this gives products the ability to be part of an ecosystem of products and services. This adds a crucial social element and so should figure into the design process.

A tablet computer in isolation is a pretty amazing device. It has tools that let you do things like write essays, draw diagrams, play games, compose music, and enjoy stored content such as books, movies, and songs. As exciting as that is, once the books are read and the movies are watched, it loses its appeal. Connecting to the cloud suddenly gives that tablet an expansive added social dimension, not to mention a great deal more use, allowing for streaming content and content downloads and having user inputs affect systems in real time. Stanford-based startup Smule started out by creating apps that allowed musical composition through on-screen keyboards and other musical instruments, but the potential for social interaction with other users who were playing music at the same time was the killer app that revealed the company’s core mission around connecting the world through live music creation experiences.1

Ecosystems are core to the social life of products, allowing a product experience to expand beyond the use of the thing alone to encompass live data, social connections, and experiences that are distributed among multiple objects.

FIGURE 7-1

Ecosystems, the Fifth Ring in the Social Life of Products Framework

Cloud Robotics: The Tech That Makes Social Intelligence Tick

When people “meet” Moxi, or any of the other mobile robots I’ve worked on with Dr. Andrea Thomaz, it feels like they are interacting with an independent entity. The robot appears to exist as an isolated device, like a toaster or vacuum cleaner might, a shell of metal and plastic with some electronics embedded inside that act as the “brain,” if you will. But social intelligence, as we’ve learned in previous chapters, is intense cognitive work, demanding time and computing power to complete. Even if the on-board processor were powerful enough, the time it might take for an isolated device to process a social exchange might make its responses so sluggish that it loses the illusion of being an entity engaged in real-time communication with a person.

Take, for example, the simple act of asking a robot like Moxi to pick up a cup in a hospital pantry, perhaps to take a glass of water to a patient. For you or me, the request takes little thought, but for the robot, recognizing and managing a cup can be a Herculean task that requires a camera scan of many items, analyzing several video still frames of the images of those items, and then sorting them to tell the difference between, say, a bowl, cup, and pitcher by the subtle geometric differences. And that’s just the start. Once the robot has identified the cup, it needs to know how to handle it. If it’s thin plastic or glass, it can be grabbed around the surface, but care needs to be taken to exert just the right amount of pressure. Squeeze too hard and it cracks, but too light and it can slip out. Placing it down onto a tray or table also requires an exquisite sensitivity that we do every day, several times a day, without realizing that our brains understand how hard to place the glass on the surface so that it won’t break, how to move it without scratching the table, and how much leeway we might have when handling it to avoid spilling the water. Every time a robot has a new task, every part of the task has to be analyzed and computed. If it’s done this task before, it may have stored some memory of the image of the glass so that the computation is not quite as intense as the first time, but it’s still a big task, in robot brainpower terms.

While there’s a lot a robot can do on its own, its ability to handle tasks like the one described above increases exponentially when it can be connected to a network. It then can not only rely on its own knowledge of the objects and environments around it but can take advantage of knowledge shared by robots all over the world. Suddenly, a robot like Moxi no longer has to learn the difference between a bowl and a cup on its own and can acknowledge the difference between a martini glass, a champagne flute, and a snifter without ever having been in the presence of any of them because robots in other parts of the world have recorded and analyzed those geometries. The robot’s “brain” in this case is no longer a contained mass in the way that we think of our brains but is a collective macro-organism powered by robot crowdsourcing that can access an ever-expanding reservoir of knowledge about the world without having to learn about it firsthand. This type of system is called cloud robotics and is invaluable given the vast amount of data needed to understand not only objects, but people and their bodies, gestures, words, and social behaviors.

The huge value of cloud robotics is evident when you compare products from before its emergence to those created after. As Dor Skuler, CEO of ElliQ’s parent company Intuition Robotics, told me: “When the social robot Jibo was created, they started with similar goals in terms of user experience. But we started around 2016 and they started around 2014 when everything had to be embedded into the device. We saw that we might be able to capitalize on cloud robotics as machine learning based services, such as speech recognition and natural language understanding, were going to be available online.”2

One Experience, Multiple Devices

When you trade in a smartphone for a newer model, getting back up to speed with preferences, contacts, apps, and other data is as simple as logging in to the new device and going through a few startup screens. Though it’s an entirely new device, within a few minutes it feels completely familiar, and you can pick up where you left off with the old device (hopefully, with a few improvements in features and capabilities). The previous device had grown with you over months, or perhaps even years, and there are well-worn paths of access to software and services that you will continue to access in the same way.

Your product’s connection to the cloud is what makes this seamless experience possible. Furthermore, the ecosystem of related devices to which it belongs makes it possible to have a shared experience across multiple devices. When you’re in the middle of episode 2, season 1 of Tales of the City on your tablet, the streaming service is something that flows through all your devices so you can pick it up on your phone, laptop, or smart TV.

While ecosystems are essential to content-driven experiences, they also provide benefits for other types of products. The Philips Hue series of connected light bulbs takes advantage of the ecosystem structure by managing relationships among the lights as well as sophisticated control for the user. Rather than offering control of one light at a time, people can control an entire room full of lights through the software, adjusting the intensity of the light as well as the color. A collection of lights can be programmed to mimic the colors in an image as well as reveal preprogrammed patterns. All of this could be handled offline, but where things get really interesting is when the system is connected to the cloud, allowing people to have the lighting reflect some live data, such as a favorite sports team’s winning shot or a text message alert from a friend. Using an online platform called IFTTT (formerly If This, Then That), people have crafted thousands of “recipes” for how Philips Hue systems can be controlled, including having lights that flash to help someone who is hearing impaired perceive alarms, turning off the lights automatically when someone leaves, or having the lights display the color of the album art on the latest song playing on Spotify’s music-streaming service.

By letting designers craft interactions that can then be transferred from one device to another, ecosystems allow the behavior of a brand to transcend one individual product to manifest through a series of distributed products that are suited to different contexts throughout the day. Amazon’s Alexa skills kit is an example of a focus on ecosystem for distributed product experiences. For example, when asking Alexa to suggest a recipe for tonight’s dinner, the Echo device can talk through a few options. It can send a video of the recipe steps to a Fire tablet in the kitchen. In the future it could prep an Alexa-enabled suite of kitchen products to get set for the cooking process to take place. A baking scale could be set to signal when two cups of flour are in a mixing bowl; an oven can be preheated to the right temperature while closing the door sets a timer for the eleven minutes it takes for the cookies to brown. It could even connect to a lighting system to choreograph mood lighting in the dining room once the meal is served, much like the smart chandelier scenario described previously, to shift based on the social context of the evening.

The ecosystem approach to product creation can blend information, data, and product capabilities to weave content through our physical devices throughout the day without us even thinking about it. The products themselves will take actions on our behalf, checking in with us along the way. Our relationships with these products also keep us connected to services, which in turn connect us to other people.

IFTTT

With the explosion of possible interactions that can take place between people and their products has come a plethora of services that enable, enhance, or otherwise supplement the experience of interactions. IFTTT, or If This, Then That, gives anyone the power to craft interactions using a software platform that connects apps, devices, and services from different developers in order to trigger one or more automations involving those apps, devices, and services.

It works by enabling people to create simple sets of instructions, aka “recipes” or applets, where some type of event in one device or service automatically triggers an action in another. For example, you can create an applet that flashes an internet-connected light bulb when an email comes in that matches an important key word. Or one that tracks your location and automatically logs in a spreadsheet how much time you spend at home or in the office. Or one that gives you a notification when the International Space Station passes over your house. The power of the system comes from the freedom to combine actions and services in a highly customized way, allowing people to define connections that create custom ecosystems of services and devices to serve very personal needs.

For example, an applet created by someone who has challenged hearing could instruct a Philips Hue bulb to flash whenever a call is received so that the room then becomes a transposed expression of the audio ringtone. It could even flash a different color to correspond to important contacts over unidentified callers.

IFTTT is also completely free and well supported. There are now more than three hundred channels—which are what you reference when creating recipes—spread across a range of devices and services, including social networks, smart appliances, smart home systems, and devices such as weather stations, audio systems, and wearables. As of the time of this writing, there are over ninety million IFTTT applets.

The Internet of Social Things

In previous chapters we discussed all the ways that products are social actors in their relationships with people. Ecosystems allow products that interact with people to also communicate with other products, creating, in essence, a community of products that can rally together to provide a person with informed, contextually appropriate experiences.

A similar set of “skills”-based events can be imagined for many aspects of daily life. A cyclist can ask Alexa to preview a new route. The maps can be sent to a smart watch or to the bike itself to display on the handlebars. A video of the route could be automatically collected from a helmet-mounted camera, and then the cyclist could be prompted to review highlights when returning home. A connection to an app such as Strava could record the route and then show data from five friends who also biked this route in the last week, adding a social dimension and offering benchmarking for athletic performance.

In typical absentminded-professor style, I am prone to losing things all the time. When my collaborator Wendy shared a key to her apartment for a weeklong working session on a project, the first thing I did was make two copies because I knew I’d inevitably lock myself out (it happened on day two). The Tile object tracker is made for people like me and harnesses the power of an ecosystem to allow my products to help me out with the absentmindedness.

The product consists of a series of small, square, battery-operated tokens that can be attached to household objects such as a key ring, a wallet, and a bag. The Tiles communicate via Bluetooth and can be registered and mapped to the objects they’re attached to via an app. Though the Tiles in isolation are idle and useless, the app provides the tracking service that is the “special sauce” that brings them to life. If an item that’s been registered is lost, the app can be used to have it “sing” to summon its owner. With their short, snappy melodic phrases, the Tile sounds are among the most pleasant of any product I’ve heard, but they are also high pitched enough to be perceptible across a distance. This little song is a great example of a social relationship between person and product, harnessing the power of expression via sound.

The ability to keep track of things misplaced in the home or another local area such as an office is an amazing benefit, but where things get really interesting with the Tile is when the closed ecosystem of a person’s Tiles and their app expands to include ecosystems of all Tile owners’ apps. This enables a community help feature that allows other Tile owners to use the service to help someone else find their lost item.

FIGURE 7-2

The Tile Object Tracker

Here’s how it works. Imagine you’ve run out of a cafe to catch a train and left your bag behind. Once you realize it’s missing, you can use your app to engage the community in a search by selecting “Notify When Found.” When someone running the Tile app comes within range of the bag, the service will send you its location and then use your phone to guide you to the exact spot where your bag was left.

This community-activated feature is a great example of how ecosystems enable services to flow through multiple products. The service connects to the Tiles, the Tiles connect to the app, and the service connects to multiple mobile devices. It expands the social benefit from being between just the person and his or her product to existing in a larger community in which all Tiles and all Tile users are connected to one another.

OBJECT LESSON

Citi Bike

When New York City introduced the Citi Bike bicycle sharing system, it was an instant success and within a few short months was folded into the fabric of everyday life throughout the neighborhoods in which it was available. Much of its success can be attributed to how well designed it is, including its attention to the social significance of every aspect of the system. The bikes themselves are created to accommodate the rider’s body, with a sensitivity to the workflow of grabbing a bike for commuting—the frame is a step-through style, making it easy to mount regardless of clothing, there is a large and easily accessible bell for alerting others on the road that you’ll be coming, and there’s a bag holder with a bungee cord to stash briefcases or grocery bags.

The true beauty of the Citi Bike experience comes from the overarching design of the ecosystem. A clear kiosk greets pedestrians as they approach the docking stations, offering a streamlined three-step approach. The kiosk has a presence that can be seen at a distance and relates to the human body as an entity that feels approachable by its size and legibility from a standing position. Riders are encouraged to download the Citi Bike app, which is the richest digital touchpoint as it adjusts to respond to context, delivering maps of bikes at the nearest station, indicating how many are available if you’re about to rent one, or offering information about open docking stations if you’re in the midst of a ride.

In addition, there are satellite programs that enhance people’s social interaction with the bike experience. At the start of the program, bike distribution was a big issue—many bikes wound up at popular destinations like train stations or at places located at the bottoms of hills rather than the top. Citi Bike trucks had to cruise the city to pick up and move the bikes to redistribute them. The Bike Angels program uses gamification to encourage people to take rides to less-populated destinations by offering points and rewards. To further enhance people’s social relationship to the system, they created a special reward for top Angels in the form of an elegant metal RFID key that serves a functional need to unlock the bike and acts as a memento of their participation and badge to others about their commitment to it.a

a. Ian Parker, “Hacking the Citi Bike Points System,” New Yorker, December 4, 2017.

Wearable Devices: The Internet of Bodies

One of the most intriguing areas of connected product development is taking place on the body. Advances in weaving and printing technologies have allowed manufacturers to embed electronic components directly into clothing, giving us constantly tracked data. If I were more of a hard-core athlete, I might invest in a connected shirt that can capture not only my exercise activity but also my heart rate. A heads-up display in a pair of connected sunglasses could display the data, giving me live feedback while running to encourage me to push harder to burn more calories or build muscle, depending on the goal that I set for myself. This ecosystem could essentially give me an ongoing dialogue with my body, creating a feedback loop that gives me a greater awareness of what’s happening with my circulatory system and muscles. When I go back home, it could plug back into the ecosystem there, where my scale and Noom food tracking can all inform one another (and again, take into account my activity to help me perhaps earn another well-deserved ice cream cone, right?).

And at the bleeding edge of device ecosystems are medical devices. When working as part of the design team at Barcelona-based Zinc, I conducted research of pregnant women to learn about the social systems that support them and figure out where communication breaks down. The insight that emerged led to our design of the Bloomlife Smart Pregnancy Tracker and app. We learned that helping women understand contractions would give them a powerful tool to help them know when the critical moment of heading to the hospital was imminent, and as a connected device it could be part of social interactions among an expectant mom, her partner, and anyone else who might support her when delivery was imminent, such as a doula or birthing coach. It’s one of the most elegant examples of truly social products that I’ve seen in production, offering a social interaction between the woman and her device, as well as those around her.

Supersensors: Combining Multiple Sources of Data

While products with individual sensors like the Tile can provide great value, we know that we can often glean great insights through having a combination of sensors on distributed products working together. The main social relationship with the product in those instances is less about a connection to one object in isolation and more about the relationship to the larger system.

I often reflect on the emergency button bracelet my mother started wearing a few years ago as a way to highlight the value of having multiple sources of data through ecosystems. I remember the day I first got my mom the medic alert bracelet. We sat in the doctor’s office as a follow-up to her release from the hospital after she’d fallen in the kitchen and couldn’t get up. She was eighty-five, and the falls, though infrequent, were still something that could be expected periodically. This last time it had happened when I wasn’t able to be around, so the EMTs had to force the lock open.

I researched a few services and selected one that seemed best, though admittedly they appeared to all be about the same. There was a plastic bracelet with a rubbery button and the option to wear a button device on a pendant in addition to the wrist-based device. Button presses would trigger a series of calls, first to the central medic alert service, which would then call both me and 911. My first reaction to the introduction of the system into our lives was one of tremendous relief. If there was another fall, I thought, I would know that she could get help right away.

Quickly, however, I grew frustrated with the system for its binary nature. There were only two modes: passive, default mode, and catastrophic emergency call. There was no information or interim action that could be taken. So there were either false alarms, when my mother pressed the button because she was testing the system, or there were dire emergencies, when she pressed it and needed immediate medical attention, but there was nothing in between. I was craving more data and a better glimpse into my mother’s health status. Were those really false alarms, I wondered? Or were they indications of something else that required further investigation into what was going on at home? While a security camera could provide lots more data, it would be an invasion of her privacy and thus uncomfortable for us both.

I learned about Lively years later and wished that it had existed when my mom and I needed it. Used in situations in which loved ones have been granted permission to track someone’s health and well-being, the product consists of a collection of devices that can be distributed throughout the home and customized to match a person’s lifestyle. Motion sensors can be attached to objects that reflect that person’s daily routine—objects with which they have regular interaction, such as a watering can, a pillbox, the cutlery drawer, or the refrigerator. The main social relationship takes place between the monitoring family member and the products. Even though the loved ones aren’t physically interacting with them, the data that’s collected offers a rich glimpse into their status without being overly intrusive. A daughter like myself can notice something awry and call to ask, “Are you okay? It looks like the plants have been neglected,” using it as a launchpad to a deeper discussion about how the person might be feeling. Reports of the data over time can also help give caretakers a deeper sense of changes in behavior that may have taken place too slowly to seem significant but over time point to an issue to be addressed. Combining this with something like the ElliQ robotic presence really capitalizes on all social aspects, using a connection to the cloud to build robust behaviors between the device and the person, the environment and the device, and the person and other people in their lives.

Looking back at our original models of communication taking place through a device and communication with a device, the ecosystem that has an agent, a connection to messaging and video chat, and an environment of connected devices allows the product to take advantage of all combinations of social aspects in one holistic experience.

Similar to Lively, the Canary home security system uses an ecosystem to provide holistic security information. Instead of a person’s health, it’s essentially the health of the home that’s monitored. It combines a security camera feed with information about air quality, temperature, and humidity. If the data becomes abnormal, such as a sudden drop in air temperature, the person can be alerted and take action to look deeper into the situation, such as checking a camera feed to see if a door was left ajar.

There are countless examples of distributed systems in many contexts, such as agriculture and retail. The Amazon Go system mentioned earlier uses technology they call sensor fusion that combines camera data with shelf sensors, such as pressure and weight measurement and inventory analysis, to provide the retail experience of simply walking into a store, placing the items you want in your bag, and walking out; there’s no checkout procedure needed. This technology can detect when products are taken or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. After leaving the store, the person’s Amazon account is charged, and they are sent a receipt. This essentially turns the entire store into a sensor-enabled space, and the social interaction remains focused between the person and the store products and shelves, rather than between the person and a checkout clerk or kiosk.

Crowdsourcing and Aggregated Data

There are many examples of small social interactions that can be enabled by ecosystems, but the most powerful effect of the ecosystem takes place when data is distributed at a large scale. The biking and running service Strava tracks activity stats as well as route maps and allows people to share them with anyone, anywhere, creating a global collection of paths that can be used by people who want to learn where good spots to exercise are. For the competitive minded, it allows people to race against one another regardless of where they are in the world, either in real time or asynchronously beating each other’s stats, providing benchmarking to measure success and set goals.

IN THE LAB

What’s Up Smart

Workplace design is inherently social design. In thinking about how devices might keep people connected and foster communal exchanges in a design studio, the Interaction Lab at Smart Design set out to create a tool to help people express their state of mind in a nonverbal way, letting others know if they are up for interaction or need to remain heads-down. The device features a Post-it–sized block with a rotating top that can be used to dial in status. Turning the top of the block ninety degrees will switch your status from “busy” to “available” while simultaneously changing the glow of the light inside to reflect what’s been set. The status also appears online via a web app that can be accessed by anyone within the company, from any of its three international offices.

Using light in this context allowed us to empower people with their own personal beacons to nonverbally and passively communicate their status. It worked effectively when others were close by—a colleague approaching another’s desk could see the light and reconsider her message—but it was also successful at allowing others to survey the landscape of desks at a distance and effectively gauge the mood of the room. If a large team was feverishly preparing for a deadline, the beacons could reveal this status through the color of the lights.

The implications of this kind of data collection are vast, and once we collect so much data, the aggregate can take on a life of its own, as soldiers from one military base in Afghanistan discovered after an Australian college student posted images of heat maps on Twitter, revealing confidential map information purely through the Strava data. This frightening debacle reveals how aggregated data can reveal patterns among multiple people that may not be apparent to one individual user’s data alone.3

Once we acknowledge the potential for ecosystems to connect us to one another by making our otherwise invisible data visible, we can start to appreciate ways to actively work together to harness the power of ecosystems for our collective good. There is a growing movement around citizen journalism in which people band together to gather data over a period of time and disperse it geographically in order to gather evidence around injustice or hazardous conditions they would like to see changed. A community-oriented nonprofit called Smart Citizen is trying to standardize measurements for air quality, temperature, light intensity, sound levels, and humidity in terms of both hardware and software.4 These collaborative activities can help people crowdsource data to give credence to their cause through recorded evidence of values that would otherwise be unable to be seen, pinpointing neighborhoods that are experiencing poor conditions, such as compromised air quality. These large amounts of data collected over time and laid out graphically on a map can help community groups take a stand in demanding that government organizations take notice and make necessary changes to provide healthy surroundings.

By using devices as connective tissue, so to speak, groups of people, products, and services that excel in social abilities can also lend themselves to social awareness. By helping people translate data into meaningful metrics, social design can reveal trends on what I like to call a macroscopic level.

After the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan, nuclear fallout was everywhere. People felt frustrated and outraged around government inaction regarding adequately measuring and communicating radiation levels, as they wanted to know if the areas where they lived and worked were safe. There was a global shortage of Geiger counters needed to survey the area, so activists organized under the group name Safecast to offer an open-source software and hardware kit for people to build their own DIY Geiger counters to collect comparable data that could be openly shared. This ecosystem of data collection devices empowered people to better understand the crisis and demand that the government take more action where it was needed.5

Weaving Brand Values through Ecosystems

We’ve explored some of the many functional benefits of building relationships among products, their users, and an extended ecosystem that can connect them together, but the ultimate emotional benefit arises from providing a strong sense of brand through a unified design effort. We’re often used to having a collection of mismatched products from different manufacturers that may or may not “play nice” with one another in terms of transferring data and sharing applications. Well-thought-out ecosystems allow brands to build benefits from the communication among products as well as the attributes of the products themselves. An added bonus is a shared language of expression so that learning the language of one product—say, pulsing blue means downloading updates—means that you understand the language of all the products. Furthermore, the tone of communication, whether in expressive gestures, spoken words, or screen-based messaging, can be consistent.

FIGURE 7-3

Withings Smart Scale, Watch, and Phone

Ecosystems can take advantage of families of products to allow people to communicate with devices and with each other, depending on the context at hand.

The Withings scale I use to track my weight, for example, can share an ecosystem with one of their elegant watches to track steps and heart rate and map out GPS, as well as with an in-home blood pressure monitor and a sleep-tracking pad. When data from these touchpoints are combined, they can help someone build a picture of their health, maintaining good habits and breaking bad ones. With so many varied products, both physical and digital, coming together, the key to making them feel like one flexible, insightful, and holistic experience comes from a design effort focused on weaving brand values through every design detail in a deliberate way.

We are accustomed to thinking of brand as manifest in logos, colors, and typefaces, but every part of our concentric circle framework can be crafted to represent brand and then applied to the pieces of the ecosystem to unify it. Imagine the power of a brand guideline that laid out guidance for materials, forms, sound, light, movement, social gestures, and phrases in a way that could spin multiple products in an ecosystem.

For Withings, brand comes across as clean, minimal, elegant, soft, friendly, and classic. Their signature smart watches feature analog dials and watch hands as opposed to the glowing digital displays that their competitors have. They capitalize on the presence part of the framework through soft, natural materials such as leather and fabric, light colors like white and gray, with bright-colored accents, and curved shapes such as the wide radius of the scale and sleep pad edges. The expression part is unified through a harmonious palette of sounds and restrained displays such as the watch face and easy-to-read scale display. Interaction is defined for the system through consistent input systems that depend on traditional physical inputs like the watch crown or the face of the scale that simply needs to be stepped on to activate, while the desktop and app tools showcase similarly soft colors and clean layouts. And context is decidedly focused on the home environment.

Having a unified brand experience would not only feel elegant but could enhance my confidence in my products, streamlining my data flow (e.g., I don’t have to actively track heart rate; the device does it for me), and ultimately make for a more enjoyable experience that fits into my lifestyle without me having to bury my head in a bunch of different apps at awkward times throughout the day.

And I know it’s wishful thinking, but the less cognitive “friction” my tools present to me in my weight-loss efforts, the better my chances of losing and keeping off those ten pounds. It might have taken a few decades to get there, but with the help of my ecosystem of social devices, a coach, and a support group, just maybe I can aim for both a bikini-ready body and that occasional rocky road ice cream cone.

DESIGNING ECOSYSTEMS TAKEAWAYS

Designing devices to connect to the cloud enables tracking that can extend a product’s benefit over time by allowing the data to persist beyond an instantaneous moment. Life updates offer the ability for improved product features to appear overnight, without any user intervention.

Behavior change, such as building healthy habits, can benefit from multiple devices harnessed as distributed touchpoints in everyday life.

Multiple sensor inputs working together provide richer and more reliable data than individual sensors alone, and a synthesis of varied inputs can be used to provide a seamless, invisible, and intuitive interaction experience, such as Amazon Go.

Services can be woven through varied products, providing a unified experience.

Brand values are reinforced through deliberate design language choices.

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset
44.201.131.213