Collaboration Improves Designer-Supplier Process and Final Product

“I want a blue line between these sections,” says the UX designer. Into the spec doc it goes: “add a blue line between these sections to improve UI.” It seems simple enough until several stakeholders and contributors interact with the little blue line at different times in the product development process.

“Will it be sky blue or royal blue?” asks marketing. “Should we make it dotted, dashed or solid?” The team agrees that a dotted, royal blue line is best.

With the internal back and forth resolved, it’s the supplier’s turn to ask for design clarifications. “The resolution of our hardware makes dotted lines look fuzzy unless they’re at least five pixels thick, and the line gets distorted at the bezel if it extends to the edge of the screen.”

Now it’s back to internal discussions. Marketing lobbies for hardware with better graphics to bring the original vision to life. Procurement wants to know if there are savings to be had by using a solid black line. The supplier offers a friendly reminder that this iteration isn’t accounted for by the original contract, so now might be the time to renegotiate.

When this collaboration nightmare becomes more like a recurring dream, it burns resources, delays time to market and ultimately shows in the quality of the product. A streamlined process for product development must clarify communication between stakeholders.

Designer to Supplier – Where’s the Disconnect?

Collaborative frustrations can yield feelings of tension every time there’s a handoff of information or responsibility: especially from designer to engineer and engineer to supplier. The real problem isn’t the other teams but the gap in collaboration that separates the teams. Written spec docs become like one long game of telephone:

  • The market demands features.
  • The designer ideates.
  • The engineer implements a technical plan.
  • The supplier executes the plan to deliver a product.

Stakeholders work at different physical locations, often sharing information about visual designs in a text-based format. The finer details get lost in translation until something as simple as a blue line can get blown out of proportion.

Model-Based Development, Functional Specs and Clear Collaboration

Model-based development gets product designers and engineers on the same page. Advancing from written spec docs to model-based graphical user interface (GUI) development solutions eliminates ambiguity, clarifies requirements and reduces rounds of back and forth. Functional specs—in the form of GUI models—replace written spec documents, so everyone is looking at the same blue line. It’s right where it belongs: between the two relevant sections on the GUI model.

Everybody benefits from not having to discuss the blue line ad nauseam.

Rapid prototyping of GUI models accelerates iterative design among internal teams. Stakeholders in various physical locations can collaborate with tight feedback loops. Usability testing can start earlier in the design process, which eliminates supplier-side iterations down the line. Innovative processes for software design, requirement development and code generation create a ripple effect throughout the entire product development lifecycle.

Software Requirements and Hardware Selection

Model-based development yields GUI models which become functional specs to show what the design will look like once implemented. When the engineers can see exactly how the blue line is supposed to look, they can determine which hardware is required to get the right look.

If a design will only look good in high definition, the supplier should expect to use premium hardware that will perform as expected. For simple GUIs that don’t require a lot of fine detail, the supplier should know to use the budget chipsets instead of trying to upcharge for anything unnecessarily advanced.

Bringing implementation closer to the design phase prevents unforeseen problems at the deadline. If a high-end human-machine interface (HMI) design is likely to strain the hardware’s memory and bandwidth, it’s better to find a solution earlier. For example, a low-power code solution can help prevent memory and bandwidth constraints from becoming problematic.

Internal vs. External Iterations

Even with streamlined collaboration, occasional conversations about blue lines and related topics might be unavoidable. The good news is that those conversations can be brief and conclusive instead of confusing and ongoing. Internal stakeholders quickly align around a functional spec in their internal meetings. Once everything has been accounted for in a fully functional spec, the design is set and ready to go to the supplier.

With this process, any external iterations will be implementation-specific and unrelated to redesign. Delivering a turnkey design to suppliers saves them time and resources—all they have to do is execute a design that has every detail accounted for in the model. This is how products get to market as designed, on budget, and ahead of schedule.

Next Steps: Improving Collaboration to Build Better Products Faster

Model-based human-machine interface design helps designers express their visions clearly. Engineers can see the design, so they know exactly what is required in the technical implementation. Suppliers receive a functional model instead of written instructions and even have clear guidance about how to select the appropriate hardware to execute the final product.

A truly comprehensive collaboration solution offers a string of tools to cover the entire product development process. For example, a GUI editor combined with a code generator creates one collaboration suite to take a project from beginning to end. Nothing gets lost in translation.

Investing in the collaboration workflow can save a project, but the benefits don’t end with that one project. Hyundai took complete control of its embedded display design to make future innovation more efficient, too. Gaining control of the collaborative process pays off in every product development project, especially when working with new suppliers to advance previous work.

Getting Started with Altia

Altia’s graphical user interface design and development environment is built to function holistically, with the GUI editor and code generator working in concert. The combination of these two functions is what closes communication gaps between stakeholders. To ease the transition, Altia’s service team helps bridge knowledge gaps to get the initial project to market on time and under budget.

If your GUI project is already underway but perhaps headed in the wrong direction, all is not lost. The Altia Design Jumpstart Bundle includes the development tools and support required to give your GUI a lift off the ground. Get started today, and let’s make it to market the right way.

Altia and Nuvoton Announce Cooperation for Embedded GUI Solutions for Next-Generation IoT and Smart Home Devices

Altia, a leading supplier of graphical user interface (GUI) development solutions for production embedded displays, and Nuvoton Technology Corporation, a leading provider of microcontrollers and microprocessors, announce that Altia-generated graphics code is running on the Nuvoton MPU NUC980. Customers of Altia and Nuvoton can now consider this powerful combination of technologies for their next-generation embedded devices.

Altia is a concept-to-code GUI solution that gives developers the power to deliver artists’ 2D and 3D graphics to production-embedded hardware. Altia’s code generators are optimized to leverage the full feature set of hardware, yielding the lowest memory footprint and best performance on a chip. Altia’s graphics code is designed for over 100 million devices worldwide in products ranging from automotive and industrial to consumer and medical.

“Nuvoton looks forward to cooperating with Altia on projects for customers designing applications for the Internet of Things and Smart Home. Altia’s industry-standard solutions will enable our customers to deliver very powerful embedded GUIs and a rich user experience on hardware like the Nuvoton MPU NUC980. Altia and Nuvoton together will enable cost-efficient embedded solutions combining well-tested hardware and software that allow a fast time to market,” Nuvoton remarks.

“Altia is well-suited to partner on code generation solutions like the Nuvoton MPU NUC980,” states Jeff Urkevich, Director of Product Marketing for Altia. “With powerful features to maximize GUI performance and carefully architected code generators yielding highly optimized code, Altia enables the smallest footprint and fastest execution on chip.”

To learn more about the NUC980DK microprocessor, visit Nuvoton’s product page. To learn more about Altia and download an Altia GUI demo for Nuvoton MPU NUC980, visit our demo offer page.

About Altia

Altia is a software company that provides graphical user interface design and development tools that can be used from concept to final production code. Our GUI editor, Altia Design, offers development teams the capability to implement a model-based development process enabling clear team communication and accelerated user interface development. Our code generator, Altia DeepScreen, supports a vast range of low- to high-powered processors from a variety of industry-leading silicon providers. Altia generates pure C source code that is optimized to take full advantage of hardware resources. Graphics code generated by Altia is driving millions of displays worldwide – from automotive instrument clusters, HUDs and radios to thermostats, washing machines and medical devices.

Our mission is to get the best automotive, medical and consumer interfaces into production in the shortest time on the lowest cost hardware.

Altia was founded in 1991. Its customers include automotive OEMs and Tier 1s like Continental Automotive, Denso, Stellantis, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Honda, Renault, Magneti Marelli, Nippon Seiki, Valeo, Visteon and more – plus leading consumer device manufacturers like Electrolux, Whirlpool, NordicTrack and many others.

For more information about Altia, visit www.altia.com or email [email protected].

Follow Altia on LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.

Altia Media Contact

Cheryl Falk
Director of Marketing Communications
+ 1 719-598-4299

About Nuvoton

Nuvoton Technology Corporation (Nuvoton) was founded to bring innovative semiconductor solutions to the market. Nuvoton was spun-off as a Winbond Electronics affiliate in July 2008 and went public in September 2010 on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE). Nuvoton focuses on the developments of microcontroller, microprocessor, smart home, cloud security, battery monitoring, component, visual sensing and IoT with security ICs and has strong market share in Industrial, Automotive, Communication, Consumer and Computer markets. Nuvoton owns 6-inch wafer fabs equipped with diversified processing technologies to provide professional wafer foundry services. Nuvoton provides products with a high performance/cost ratio for its customers by leveraging flexible technology, advanced design capability, and integration of digital and analog technologies. Nuvoton values long term relationships with its partners and customers and is dedicated to continuous innovation of its products, processes, and services. Nuvoton has established subsidiaries in the USA, China, Israel, India, Singapore, Korea and Japan to strengthen regional customer support and global management. For more information, please visit http://www.nuvoton.com.

Nuvoton Media Contact

Carol Chang
Microcontroller Digital Marketing Deputy Director
+886-3-5770066 ext. 23123

 

Full-Featured GUIs When Power is Precious

Altia’s GUI development software enables low power consumption and high frame per second (FPS) performance for designing and deploying graphical displays with TI AM62x.

Altia Toolchain Flow-01

How Altia Optimizes GUIs for TI AM62x

  • The Altia toolchain includes a time-saving workflow for faster time to market
  • Altia’s pixels-to-production solution delivers artists’ assets to hardware
  • Altia Design enables teams to design and develop a full-featured, custom UX
  • Altia DeepScreen code generator is architected to leverage all on-chip resources
  • Altia generates production-ready C code that consumes minimal memory
  • Altia CloudWare™ enables cloud-based design and development on TI AM62x
  • Altia Engineering Services is available to support any and all parts of your embedded GUI project

Altia and TI AM62x—High Impact GUIs for Low Power Systems

Altia is proud to provide GUI design and highly optimized code generation solutions for the TI AM62x. See Altia in action on TI Sitara™ today.

Download our QuickStart Guide for Health Monitor and Instrument Cluster Demos

Learn more about Altia Electric Vehicle Charging Station GUIs on TI AM62x

Get Started with Altia

Altia provides the software, services and expertise to get your next embedded user interface into production. Click here to discover the best plan to support your project goals.

Translate »