Why a Successful Smart Product Design is Subtle in Its Achievement

Developers of smart products find themselves pitted against a crushing set of requirements that only starts with ensuring long battery life, fully secure operation, and maximum performance. In balancing conflicts between these core requirements, developers can compromise more subjective requirements for usability or other human factors. Users are then left to deal with a product that is physically ungainly, or seems more difficult to use than it is worth. In tackling a growing array of design challenges, product developers are more likely to succeed when they more broadly consider the user’s perspective. The resulting design is often subtle in its achievement, offering what has been called "invisible intelligence."

Power and performance have for years stood at the top of developers’ lists of key design concerns, and that's not going to change. Instead, new requirements seem to accrete, presenting an increasingly formidable barrier to smart product designers. Yes, users demand extended battery life and rapid response of more sophisticated features in their wearables, IoT devices, and other connected products. But the nature of these products brings additional demands that are no less important.

A painfully evident example is security in these connected systems. As smart products continue to work their way more deeply into users' everyday routines, they have become an essential participant in the private details of personal and professional life. Users simply assume that confidential data will remain protected at rest within the device, in use during application execution, and in transit across the public Internet. Any violation of this confidence is a stark betrayal, and even the longest battery life or the highest performance won't shield development organizations from significant damage to their revenue and reputation.

In looking to expand the role of smart products in users' homes and offices, developers face further requirements that expand along more qualitative dimensions. Two easy examples are the product's appearance and its usability. Even the most ardent technophiles among us aren't keen to clutter our comfy living spaces with industrial-looking electronic boxes, regardless of their other virtues. Designs for mainstream smart products like Amazon Echo, Facebook Portal, and Google Home Hub take this into account with product designs meant to provide brilliant capabilities, while drawing as little attention to themselves as possible when not in use.

Similarly, when in use, those capabilities are presented in ways designed to simplify users' interactions with them. Features such as natural language voice interfaces and smart cameras accommodate the user rather than forcing the user to accommodate some tortuous interface.

Figure 1: For its MAXREFDES100 health sensor development platform, Maxim combines multiple sensors with a Darwin MAX32620 MCU, leveraging the MCU's capabilities to deliver a sophisticated health development platform with minimal power requirements in a minimal footprint. (Image source: Maxim Integrated)

This notion of subtle sophistication is a vital design objective for any smart product. Facebook refers to it as "invisible tech" in its Portal device. Maxim Integrated more broadly calls this concept “invisible intelligence”, and backs it up with its Darwin MCU family and associated devices specifically created to help designers achieve it in smart product designs. Darwin MCUs such as the Maxim MAX32620, MAX32625, and MAX32630 all provide developers with great flexibility for optimizing power consumption without compromising functionality. See, “Build More-Effective Smart Devices: Part 1 – Low-Power Design with MCUs and PMICs.”

Secure versions of Darwin MCUs such as the MAX32631 integrate a specialized trust protection unit designed to enhance security for code and for data at rest, in use, or in transit. See, “Build More-Effective Smart Devices: Part 2 – Secure Design.” All members combine their 32-bit Arm® Cortex®-M4F core with an extensive set of peripherals and plenty of memory, providing a high-performance platform needed to handle the larger software code base in smart products. See, “Build More-Effective Smart Devices, Part 3 – Processor Performance.”

Maxim Integrated demonstrates these features in the sort of design that is becoming the benchmark for wearables. The Maxim MAXREFDES100 health sensor development platform takes full advantage of Darwin MCU capabilities, combining its MAX32620 MCU with its MAX30003 ECG analog front-end and other sensors in a low-power, battery-operated design about the size of advanced fitness wearables (Figure 1).

With the rapid migration of next-generation smart products into every facet of life and work, users increasingly expect that these products will provide valuable services simply and unobtrusively, hiding tremendous capability in a simple package and behind an intuitive interface. For designers, the emergence of devices like Maxim Integrated's Darwin MCUs meets a growing need for hardware platforms capable of delivering the invisible intelligence needed to meet these expectations.