IoT In Website Design And Development

Internet of things (IoT) is gaining popularity across the web. It is all set to revolutionize human interaction with technology, bringing about change to people’s lives. To be precise, the term ‘things’ in IoT refers to those everyday objects that we find in our houses – connected to the internet. It is said that a deep bond has been formed between the virtual and real world through IoT.

And interestingly, our website design and web development process are slowly being connected to work in line with the IoT. A better definition of IoT is that a device is assigned a unique ID, making it easier to pull together information, which can be then exchanged or shared over the internet without the need for a human interference. Some of the examples of IoT devices include Apple Watch, Nest, ATM machines, self-driving cars, and others.

The concept of IoT has been around since the year 1974, but it was not until recently that people were hit with a realization on how IoT can change the process of human interaction to make their lives better. This means that this device can pull and transmit information over the internet without any human interaction. Nowadays, IoT and web design are connected for better user experience.

IoT and Website Design

So how do IoT and website design connect?

Before that, it is important to understand graphical user interface (GUI) – which is all the elements of a site that you can find on your mobile app, desktop and others. In fact, your design layout is what spreads through these that you are seeing.

Now, it is important to find out what are the different design considerations and other latest web design trends that need to be implemented with IoT to improve interaction.

Back End

How do you think you can connect your users to get them to interact with IoT devices? So, this interaction with IoT devices can be powered by initiating a communication bridge between these.  The technique of communication would vary from one device to another – since each device has a unique set of capabilities, commands, and functionalities that are used to transmit and receive information.

But now, you can use node.js, which is one of the common web development frameworks that can be used for interaction with IoT devices. Each device has their own unique set of well-defined and documented methods and properties.

User Interface

It is important that when a web-based user interface has been designed for a specific IoT app, then it needs to be reliable, robust, sophisticated and, above all, should be fast. Some of the standard usability best practices would need to be used for the design of this interface, along with ensuring a great user experience, an intuitive and logical flow. All these ideas should be strategized for all devices, including mobile.

Speed and Reliability

In the traditional web design strategy, a request is processed and sent to the web server, which processes the information and sends back the related data. But when web design is connected with IoT, there is more to it than discussed above. This means there is a kind of inactivity that would crop in. So when it comes to design, it is better to implement the one that you generally prefer for slow designs.

Privacy and Security

One of the shortcomings of IoT is that it is vulnerable to attacks by hackers. If there are no essential security measures taken to protect your design connected with IoT, an attack can happen at any time from anywhere. And they can do a lot of things, such as accessing the contents or tampering and meddling with the content, which sounds scary. The most important point to keep in mind when integrating web design with IoT is that there is no loophole left out for a potential hacker to attack.

Managing Power

Many a time, these IoT devices are wireless devices that run on battery. This means that whenever the interaction or communication exceeds a limit, the battery might be washed off. So it is important that designs should be strategized such that there is less power usage.

Testing Considerations

So we need to test the IoT site for security reasons and to check how well does it manage power under any situation.

As we discussed IoT has already set out to bring about a revolution across the world of web. There are even those home appliances that run of IoT to help with light and temperature adjustments along with security cameras.  By the year 2020, it is expected that over half the business processes around the globe will adopt IoT.

Impact of IoT in Web Design and Development

So let us see how would be the impact of IoT in web design and development process.

As you might be aware, we all have had a chance to experience the IoT and its awesomeness at a particular point of time. Businesses have already started using certain specific technologies to help them track users, their behavior and patterns that go through the user journey when they land on a site as a visitor and later turn into a customer.

A personalized and unique service is what all users prefer at all times, and this is where an IoT device plays an important role in providing users with a customized experience. IoT is expensive, which has made it difficult for certain businesses to stay away from adopting it for their business needs.

So how does it affect various aspect of the web?

Web design and development become more intricate.

Here, users usually depend on the interface at the front-end for interacting with IoT devices, which means that the design becomes more complex. Some of these IoT devices include cameras, smart devices, and sensors.

Also, it would need websites to be capable of interacting with databases in the backend to store personalized data coming from IoT devices. The network for IoT devices might cause delays, which means that the page load speed should be increased during the design and development processes of the site.

Going forward, we would find that designers and developers would have to take advantage of complex languages for building a great user interface at the front-end, providing users with the provision to interact with IoT devices in the backend as well.

Now, what do you need for this?

A better and experience professional web services provider is the need of the hour. A number of excellent frameworks would need to be collated together for a great user experience to unfurl. You need experienced hands that have a vast experience in this field to help you with the development and creation of the interaction platform for your IoT devices. And once the design is taken care of, the development can be started keeping in mind the design processes that were involved to make this a success. So the developer needs to run great strategies before finalizing one.

The designers and developers related to a project need to have a clear understanding of what they need. So before you start organizing your team, it is essential that you have a clear idea of what expertise you would need to carry out the design and development with ease. So you should get answers regarding the expertise and skills of your people before you hand over your project to them.

Once that is done, take a deeper look at the coding challenges. We cannot find a standard solution for any of these, but there is an ample number of solutions for everything. Here is a challenge for designers and developers. The project managers need to have a clear picture of what challenges might emerge and should be ready to face the worst with the best of solutions that they can come up with.

Designing and Developing IoT devices for Displaying The Web

In near future, we would be able to get our hands on a number of devices that display web content to people.

Devices that are used for computing and have small displays

There are those devices, such as Raspberry Pis, which have smaller screen sizes and here you will find that these devices can play an important role in displaying web content online. These can be displayed in the form of web pages or come in the form of local web pages or local dashboard style.

Smart Watches

These smartwatches come with displays that are smaller and have a wide range of colors as well as screen resolutions. Apple watches do not have a web browser, but Android has a web browser for its Android Wear. And very soon, we would see the dawn of new web browsers.

Personal Assistants

A lot of personal assistants are popping up these days. The most famous ones include Cortana from Microsoft, Amazon Echo’s Alexa, Google’s Now and Siri of Apple. The information would be read out and that is something more interesting and useful than visual display. It could do anything from adjusting the temperature to setting alarms, turning lights on and off, and more.

Though it is not necessary that the front-end development of the web adapts to fit in the IoT and other upcoming trends, but in near future, these should be capable of doing that.

The IoT and its connection to web design have a long way to go and we can expect miracles to unveil over the years to come. In the year 2018, we could see new changes being brought about with the implementation of IoT across various facets of web design. Already people have started experiencing the advantages of these integrations and implementation of IoT devices, as these are making their lives simple and easy.

Acodez is a web design company India offering all kinds of web related services at affordable packages with no compromise over quality. We also offer SEO services to our clients to help them take the businesses to the next level. For further information, please contact us today.