Designing Connected Products

Chapter 9. Cross-Device Interactions and Interusability

BY CLAIRE ROWLAND

In systems where functionality and interactions are distributed across more than one device, it’s not enough to design individual UIs in isolation. Designers need to create a coherent UX across all the devices with which the user interacts. That means thinking about how UIs work together to create a coherent understanding of the overall system, and how the user may move between using different devices.

This chapter explores interusability—the user experience of interconnected devices and cross-platform interactions—and how to make a bunch of diverse devices feel like they are working in concert.

This chapter introduces:

• Cross-platform UX and the need to design for systems, not just devices (see Cross-Platform UX and Usability)

• The concept of interusability (see What Is Interusability?)

• The role of conceptual models in understanding what a system does, and why these are especially complex in IoT (see Conceptual Models and Composition)

• Composition: distributing functionality between devices (see Composition)

• Consistency across multiple UIs (see Do users have set expectations of devices?)

• Continuity of data and interactions across devices (see Consider the most likely combinations of devices)

• Applying interusability thinking to broader contexts (see Broader contexts of interusability)

This chapter addresses the following issues:

• What makes a cross-device system feel coherent (see Cross-Platform UX and Usability)

• Why it’s ...