We’ve all seen Apple’s iPhone. The phrase “game-changing” gets thrown around a lot, but this is one instance where it’s truly applicable. It has put human machine interface (HMI) technology at the top of the list of product marketing and development considerations.
Can you imagine a world where the iPhone costs $1000, or where the animations from screen to screen are jerky and halting? Either extreme could have extinguished this user-interface torchbearer before anyone saw the light.
Experienced product designers understand that some of the choices they make are critical to the success of the product—and they often must be made at the project start, when little is known about requirements.
As developers, we’re not always in control of the stakes that get placed in the ground for our projects. Perhaps we’ve been directed to stick with a previous product’s proven platform—but management wants to “jazz up” the HMI a bit. Promising your leadership an iPhone and then delivering a clock radio is a sure-fire way to get fired.
Or, maybe the marketing department has discovered a revolutionary, killer HMI that is backed up by tons of research. All you need to do is to pick a sufficient chip. Just beware that every extra nickel you add to the bill of materials (BOM) costs your company millions. Remember that swimming pool you were going to put in with your bonus? Get ready for the Jelly-of-the-Month club.
Finding the right combination of cost and performance (Fig. 1) is critical to the creation of a winning product. Choose a platform that’s not powerful enough and you hamstring the user experience. Choose one that’s overly capable, and you’re slashing money directly from your bottom line.
The solution to this dilemma is to figure out either your hardware’s HMI capability or your HMI’s demand for hardware—before you engineer your solution. In a sense, you must complete your project before you start.
I propose using an HMI graphics code generator (Fig. 2) to get a glimpse into the future. A code generator allows you to quickly build an interface and generate code with the push of a button. Reducing the effort to the needed design and building an interface allows you to experiment with your project’s known variables.
Does marketing have a killer HMI? Create one of its more demanding screens and see just how low down the processor food chain you need to go. Be prepared for execs to do their Monty Burns impersonations as they bask in the glow of their spreadsheets. Creating an HMI to run on existing hardware? Work up some graphic concepts to see which types of effects are possible. Share the good news with your manager and invite marketing over for a celebratory demonstration.
Both of these scenarios allow you to quickly feel out your platform’s capabilities and the needs of your HMI. You’ll be able to create “right-size” solutions that intelligently balance platform cost with user experience. Whether you build your product around a pre-selected processor or allow your marketing team to define a product interface based on market research and emerging trends, rapid development with a code generator is essential for making the right choices about pairing your platform with your interface.
PRE-DETERMINED HARDWARE
Let’s take a look at the case where the hardware that will be used for a project is already set in stone—usually a platform used in a previous project. There is much to like about this approach. The hardware and, more importantly, the toolset are already proven out. Ramp-up time is practically nonexistent, and there is probably considerable expertise within your company to support the tools and the processor. Costs for this previous-generation platform are less. If the previous product is still shipping, there’s also a chance for even greater savings because you’re buying in increased volumes.
The downside is that this platform is not the latest and the greatest. It’s simply the tradeoff that you have accepted to take advantage of the lower per-unit cost. Can your team create the next big thing in your industry using this platform? Does it have enough juice to deliver a stand-out HMI and user experience? It had better. Remember all those iPod competitors who were a few dollars cheaper? (No one else does, either.)
So, you have your hardware sitting on your desk, but no graphics code generator. Where do you start? You could start with the HMI for the last product that was released and begin to push the edges out a bit, but you were in on that project and know just how much “duct tape” was used to rush that thing out the door in time. And, seriously, haven’t we all seen too many of those last-generation HMIs that have been kept on life support for way too long?