More and more companies are turning to embedded sensors and connected devices as a way to improve their service offerings and bring more value to their customers. This connected ecosystem of technology, services and value provides designers with an opportunity to look beyond the design of a screen interface (UI - user interface design) and embrace a more holistic approach to designing full experiences and solutions (UX - user experience design).

This case study will walk you through the opportunities (and challenges) we faced in designing an experience for a connected device. While UX practitioners have a myriad of tools available to them in their toolboxes, we will be focusing primarily on the use of these 3 tools:

1. Contextual research - its importance and the importance of who conducts it
2. Mapping and looking at how ecosystem mapping can be used to create a multi-layered map of technology, business, value and how mapping the physical can become important when designing for connected environments
3. Notification design and re-thinking how cues, such as visual, auditory and haptic, can come into play when you are no longer designing for a device and can, instead, integrate your design into the physical environment

... and how we leveraged them to create a design solution that integrates into both the physical and digital environment of our client.

Take a recently acquired high-profile client with global stakeholders, insert a very aggressive timeline for a complex problem, throw a global team of researchers, designers and developers at it, and see what happens!

Wonderful things can happen when multi-disciplinary teams are engaged on intense, complex projects using Agile methods. But, tight timeframes magnify problems that otherwise would have been easily worked through, including: internal and external team dynamics; communication challenges; and time zone differences. We will share with you the good, the bad and the ugly of what happened, and what we learned from our experience.