Figure 9.8: Home automation routines stored in the cloud will not run if the
internet connection goes down. If they are stored locally, they will continue to
run (although the user won’t be able to see this or control devices remotely).
(Clock icon by Christoph Robausch from the Noun Project) BOTH NEED
WIFI GATEWAY ADDING
How you choose to distribute system intelligence is a system architecture
issue, as discussed in chapter 3. What’s most appropriate for your system will
depend on what it does and your users’ expectations. An intruder alarm should
not fail completely because the internet went down. But it’s not a disaster if
your energy monitoring system is occasionally unavailable for short periods of
time, as long as data is not lost.
The new challenge for UX is that this is a lot of complexity that users didn’t
previously have to worry about (see the discussion of the ‘ surprise package’ in
chapter 4). There are two ways to deal with this complexity: you can explain
it, or try to hide it.
Although BERG are now defunct, the BERG Cloud bridge, the gateway for
Little Printer, was a simple example of a device that explained how the system
was working.. It had LEDs to show whether the device had power and an
Ethernet connection, and upstream and downstream connectivity (see figure
9.9). It was labeled to explain that upstream meant that the bridge could see
the BERG cloud internet service, and downstream meant that the ZigBee
network used to connect to local devices was running. The gateway was
communicating the system image.