Designing User Interfaces for Cooperating Devices

By Niall Murphy

April 16, 2007

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Making the user interface for one device easy, slick, fun, and fast is a challenge. If you have multiple devices and they need to cooperate, the challenge increases dramatically. As wired and wireless communications hardware gets cheaper, the design opportunities for communicating devices become more common. For example, a Java applet on my cell phone can control my home security system. My digital video recorder (DVR) uses IR to change channels on the set-top box from the satellite TV company. The controls on my car's dashboard can make a phone call using the phone in my pocket. Each pair of devices provides the user with two user interfaces, and those user interfaces must combine to provide a rational final system.

Early adopters will be happy to fiddle with settings that ensure that all of their gadgets talk to each other. More mainstream users will want to minimize the number of times they have to think about the fact that they're controlling more than one device. The classic living room problem is having three remote controls, each of which can control volume, yet only one works on each system. This issue replicates itself in many other areas where a combination of devices must cooperate.

These scenarios provide the user with two different user interfaces on two different devices. The designer must try to ensure that the two, or possibly more, devices present a coherent final system to the user. If you're designing both devices, you want to make the feel of both devices similar.

I recently worked on a design that had two separate GUIs -- one full-size touchscreen and a smaller "helper" screen for occasional use. The smaller screen needed to look consistent with the full-size screen. Simply scrolling the smaller display to provide all of the information on the larger display would have been a lazy choice by the designer. Careful choices had to be made as to what information normally available on the full display would be left out of the smaller display. Using a similar font and background colors meant that the overall feel of the small display was consistent with the larger display, but the fact that the display was physically smaller made it obvious to the user that this wasn't the primary interface to the device.

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