How the Internet of Things Impacts Testing and UX
As the world becomes more connected—from your watch gaining Internet functionality to a chip implanted into your door knob—the manner by which we test and interact with our environment changes. Previously, both testing and actively using a door knob took little more than a turn of your wrist. Now, the automated locks or Bluetooth mechanism that ties the object to your phone require a new level of user and tester understanding.
The Internet of Things provides new, exciting possibilities for everyone involved, but with these new possibilities come just as many challenges. Shailesh Mangal, the CTO of Zephyr, explained to StickyMinds how we have to shift our thinking before we can adapt to the upcoming connected world:
... [T]esting will have to be both subjective as well as objective. Not everything can be measured in certain cases, as the testing has to go into the wild, so to speak, where we need to create the test environments to test the devices and put them through the real-world use cases.
Beyond the testing challenges, developers have yet to find a common, standardized user experience for all the IoT devices that are beginning to flood the market. Is it going to lean toward being based on mobile? Is your IoT fridge going to be self-configuring?
None of these questions have been answered quite yet, but what might be most critical to keep in mind during this transition is that users are looking to put in as little work as possible in order to get a new device to function. An oven that cooks your roast at the perfect temperature and turns off when the meat is juiciest sounds wonderful in theory, but if it’s difficult to configure and more trouble than what you already have, the value to the user isn’t there.
What we all want is to buy connected devices that work as easily as the things we have in our houses right now. And that’s not possible if, as Computerworld’s Robert L. Mitchell points out, each device you buy comes with its own app that you have to configure and program separately. Uniformity is key.
We don’t anticipate bugs or glitches that might be found on our phone to suddenly appear in the real world. It’s understandable in our minds if Skype fails, but that doesn’t carry over to the locks on our doors. Testing and UX will need to change as the world around us evolves, and while we’re beginning to show signs of progress, we still have a long way to go before the IoT future feels like a modern, stable reality.
