Designing to scale: A human centered approach to designing applications for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) presents an opportunity for hitherto passive objects in the physical world to acquire digital personalities, resulting in a network of unprecedented scale. Extracting data from multiple devices in the network to present relevant and contextual information is a daunting task that requires an understanding of the needs of users at multiple levels of complexity. This paper proposes a unified basis that should be taken into account across applications, whilst designing for IoT. Three segments of applications are explored - standalones, collaborators and aggregators, each with a different level and type of complexity. We describe examples of these segments, and consider the role, nature and links between each. To address the design challenges this may pose, we suggest a human centered design approach that brings together these application segments. This enables us to create an overall user experience which abstracts the underlying complexity of a typical IoT application, in a way that is meaningful to the end-user.