 Hello, my name is Nick Schultz and I'm a field application engineer at Crank Software. We at Crank are thrilled to be able to speak to you today, and we will be talking about the importance of rapid HMI development and why it's more essential than ever in today's world. First off, I'd like to thank each and every one of you for taking the time out of your day for joining and attending the virtual session. These are unprecedented times. 2020 has thrown more than a few curveballs our way. Many of us have had to change how we live and do business. I'm sure that all of us would much rather be talking and connecting in person. I know I've spent my share of days at events getting the chance to meet and speak with people who are passionate about technology and innovation. Despite us not all being in the same room, I know that the passion for engineering and innovation is still just as strong as ever, and there are plenty of new challenges waiting to tackle in the embedded software industry. So we at Crank are thrilled to be getting a chance to speak to you today, and we'd definitely like to thank ST Micro for hosting such an amazing platform for sharing ideas and allowing innovation to flourish. Before we dive straight into the content, I want to give you a quick overview of what we'll be covering in this session. For starters, I'll give you guys a quick overview of who Crank Software is as a company and why we were founded. Then we'll switch into some of the broader implications of rapid GUI development and why it's essential for today's embedded applications. And finally, we'll touch on a few customer success stories, highlighting some of their challenges and how we were able to help them succeed. Ideally, by the end of this talk, you're going to have a good understanding of some of the challenges that GUI developers face today and what you need to embrace to be successful. So about Crank Software, Crank Software is a privately held software and services company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. We were founded in 2007. A leadership team has an extensive background in embedded software systems and embedded graphics, and our product storyboard has been founded and used in products across the globe inside small organizations all the way up to Fortune 500 companies. We've received numerous awards and been recognized for our software and the products our customers have made with storyboard. With millions, and that's a very conservative number of devices in the field today, we're shaping the next generation of embedded user interfaces. If you haven't heard of us before, I can guarantee you that you've seen or you've even interacted with some of the products out there using storyboard. Our technology was created to help make UI development easier on embedded platforms, traditional markets like medical, automotive, and industrial, or even consumer markets like wearables and white goods all share common challenges when looking to deliver an exciting and excellent user experience on an embedded display. So onto today's topic, why rapid GUI development is essential for today's embedded systems. Well, it's no secret that we live in a rapidly changing and evolving world. Technology that was once considered groundbreaking and even a gold standard very quickly becomes improved upon, adapted, or even replaced. It's a competitive world out there and many of you have likely seen this in your own place of work. If you think of when a competitor releases a new product and all of a sudden you're forced to react and pivot so your product stays competitive or takes a new direction, or perhaps you could even think about the number of iterations that take place when you bring a concept from prototype to production, I guarantee the end result is pretty different from where everything all started. All of those examples underline the fact that change is inevitable and frequent iteration is required. You need to be able to embrace change so you can deliver the best product to market quickly and at the highest quality possible. If your workflow doesn't embrace change and iteration, then your product won't be able to evolve and change as you do and this could just cause you time, you know, or you may not be able to make the adjustments that you need to successfully get your product to market. At the end of the day, you want it to be successful and this is the way that you can do that. So really, you know, what I talked about a little bit before, but what's driving all of this is the expectations for embedded devices is changing rapidly and the demands are increasing. You know, if you think of all the smartphones that we carry along in our pockets today, you know, we all have the best and greatest example of what, you know, state-of-the-art touchscreen experiences can be and, you know, we can't help but carry that over to any other interface that we interact with. So the expectations are high and, you know, generally users don't have a lot of patience for something that is substandard or, you know, not intuitive. Also, the user interface is, you know, more and more of a defining part of products today. You know, if the UI isn't something that people consider, you know, smooth or fluid or compelling, then they might dismiss a product despite it being, you know, functionally quite good and competent. As well as we've seen this year especially, you can have dramatic shifts in global markets in patterns. You know, in this case where even, you know, everybody changes and starts working, working from home and isolating, you know. So your products need to be able to react to those things. And again, all of this comes back to your development flow, your workflow, your tooling and how you enable yourself to react and evolve when change comes into play. So we make our customers successful with a few different reasons. You know, up here you can see that, you know, some of the core things that we focus on and these are things that really we focused on from the beginning back when Crank Software was founded in 2007. You know, but at the end of the day you need to accelerate development. You need to embrace iterations and you need a lot of UI flexibility. And that's exactly what the market conditions and expectations are demanding today. Rapid GUI development is more or less the way that you can achieve those things. You know, it is a workflow that allows you to incorporate, you know, feedback. So bringing it in from your users quickly and frequently. You can very easily measure your progress. So as you're moving through deliverables and development, you have very clear checkpoints along the way. You're able to quickly and easily adapt. So, you know, if you're going down a path and you test it out and the user feedback isn't good, well, you can move that and change that. And that's very important. You also have the ability to explore early system integration where because the rapid development of prototypes is so quickly, you can deploy on systems and start integrating with real hardware and sensors where maybe you wouldn't have been able to do that with other workflows. You also get the benefit of having a very clear separation of, you know, system components and where all of their responsibilities lie. And that's something as we go through and as I talk a little bit about, you know, what we've done and why our product is successful is something you'll see that we do very well, you know, because ultimately our goal at Crank Software is to make our customers successful. So, you know, to do that, we focus on accelerating development. As you see there, you know, we embrace iterations and our goal is that we can provide a scalable and flexible UI solution. So, you know, all the features that you'll see in the next slides, they sort of tie into that rapid GUI development model. And it's part of why we think it's so important. And, you know, why some of our customers have been so successful. So, when we say accelerate development, you know, it could mean a few different things. But for us, most importantly is, you know, we really help you start and hit the ground running when it comes to taking content from a design and turning it into an interactable prototype and then carrying it forward into development. So, we can do a direct import from some of the very common UI design tools on the market, things like Photoshop and Sketch. Import them into our tool. And then right off the bat, you have all the building blocks of the UI and your design ready to start adding interactions. From there, you know, you can start using things like our integrated animation timeline tool to start building up, you know, kind of that extra polish and sparkle. You can, you know, test, iterate, review it all within the tool and really kind of hone in on that experience that you're looking for. And, you know, you get a very good idea what that, you know, the UI flow is. You can rapidly test the usability of some of your prototypes and your designs. And all of this can be done without requiring final hardware. So, you can run your application. Maybe you're evaluating a few different developer boards, trying to decide if you're going to go with an MCU solution or use an MPU. But, you know, all of this can be done in parallel. So, again, you're not stuck in that cyclical model and you can really focus in on coming up with the right UI and the right experience for your end users. We kind of talked about this, you know, indirectly, but embracing iteration is how you can really fine-tune and focus your product. You know, once the development begins, you know, your designers and your developers, they can work in parallel. You know, you can have someone who doesn't have an embedded software experience and background come in and start implementing features in the UI. And that, you know, allows the embedded engineers to work on their sections. You can introduce design changes and iterate your UI look, feel, and logic, and that doesn't impact the lower level of systems engineering and backend code pieces, if you will. Down the line, if you wanted to reskin your design, you can just re-import a Photoshop or Sketch design file, and that leaves you with all the behavior you had before, but the tool will go through and replace all the image assets, update the positions, fonts, things like that. So again, you can really quickly iterate the look and feel of your applications. And as you're going through, all of this hooks into, you know, revision control and collaboration tools. So you've got all the pieces so you can work in, you know, distributed teams, you know, as many of us are doing today, or even with people in different sections of the world in different time zones. So you can, you know, compare, merge changes and collaborate efficiently and quickly and easily. When it comes down to UI flexibility, this means a few different things to us. You know, most importantly, from our point of view, is the Storyboard product was created to be platform-agnostic, and that way our customers, they can de-risk their projects by introducing a software framework that easily supports technology and design change at any point in the development cycle, you know, whether it be a concept of scalability. So I mentioned this before, if you're unsure if you're using an MPU or perhaps an MCU, you can scale across a range of embedded hardware. And as you can see there, you can leverage different pieces of the hardware and software stack as you go. So perhaps you're looking at, you know, an MCU chip that doesn't have any acceleration. You can use our software renderer as you move up. Maybe there's some 2D accelerators, like the Chromart DMA2D piece that is found on a lot of the ST hardware. Or perhaps on the higher end boards, things like hardware layers, multiple cores, or even 3D acceleration. So GPUs that can support OpenGL and Vulkan. All of those are available to you without having to switch your software development environment. So you can build your UI regardless of that and have that common development environment. You know, so that leads you to having portability. You know, you can swap out the hardware in the OS as well without having to change your UI. And then finally, reusability. So, you know, perhaps you're coming into an existing product line where you can then start building up a UI and scale it across different iterations of the same product. Maybe it's a good, better, best type scenario where different versions of your product have larger displays or different features. You know, you can build on that core and reuse content as you go across different applications. So, onto some of the customer stories, you know, and each of them as we go through them sort of highlight different pieces of what I've talked to you about today. But, you know, I really think this helps bring some of the concepts home as well as, you know, for us, it was a really good, you know, validation of everything that we believe as a company and how you should go about UI development really came home. So, the first is a company called Dometic. And they are a company that provides solutions for mobile living. So, particularly if you think of, you know, the image there is sort of a RV type application. So, food and beverage, climate, power and control, hygiene and sanitation. You know, basically what they want to do is make mobile life for outdoor living easy for their end clients. And, you know, that's something that's becoming more and more popular these days when the market is getting increasingly competitive. So, they were looking to enter a new product category to sort of diversify themselves and, you know, stay competitive in the mobile living space. And traditionally, Dometic had been outsourcing their design works to different partners across the globe. They had limited resources in-house and they also had pretty aggressive deadlines so they needed to find a tool that could help develop their new product which they ended up calling the Dometic Interact. Like all projects, it had to be delivered on time and on budget. And really what, you know, put them over the edge is that they wanted to view a prototype at a trade show which was only a few months away. And historically, I'm sure, you know, anybody in this position has gone through something like this before. It can be a little bit, you know, stressful. But, you know, they succeeded. And, you know, we firmly believe without the rapid development capabilities that Storyboard offers, you know, Dometic wouldn't have been able to meet the deadline for the show or at least provide the quality and level of prototype that they did. So, you know, with a few months to go, they were coming to us and evaluating Storyboard. Then, you know, full disclosure, they were evaluating alternative solutions on a common hardware platform. And their criteria for choosing a UI development tool included, you know, things like software that was configurable and easy to use. They needed a flexible architecture that the team could continuously build upon. And, you know, after looking at a few different solutions out there, they ended up selecting Storyboard. And, you know, the top three reasons that they gave to us was, first, the ease of use for software development for the UI. They really liked the hardware and OS agnostic platform. And, you know, something we take quite seriously and we're quite happy to see this, but they really liked the supportive team and feedback that Crank Software was able to give them. And, you know, I mentioned earlier that, you know, we're all about making our customers successful. So, you know, that goes sort of hand-in-hand with choosing Storyboard as your UI development solution. So, when it came down to it, they had settled on us Crank Software sort of late in the fall and their project deadline was early spring. Their engineering team was still figuring out the hardware platform and application architecture, but their designers were able to start playing around with the UI and, you know, they were building up designs in Photoshop and importing it in, laying out their graphics and building animations. And, you know, the Photoshop import feature really allowed their designers to come up with those really high-fidelity, interactive mockups and prototypes. And they could test that very, very quickly and iterate on it and, you know, do all of that in parallel to the, you know, the main core logic of the product and the application. And, you know, since adding new content and features was so easy, you know, the team was able to add product functionality that they didn't think was actually possible based on the timelines they already had. So, when it came time to debut their prototype, this was their biggest event of the year, the RVX Show, the team won first place for the Dometic Interact and received the Cityscape Award at the RVX Show. So, with Storyboard, the engineering teams were able to get up and running fast. They used their prototype to make informed decisions based on user feedback and testing. And then Storyboard allowed them to easily iterate and continually validate and test their features and functionality. And this resulted, you know, an award-winning demo and prototype for the show, but an extremely feature-rich and polished product. And they had delivered and built this and brought it to market faster than they had ever built products in the past. So, it's something we're quite, quite proud of. Another customer success story and something you may have heard about and seen press release in the news, Ventech Life Systems. And, you know, it seemed rather appropriate to use this story given the current state of the world. But if you're unaware, Ventech is a company that makes ventilator systems. And, you know, kind of what makes them unique goes back a few years. So, seven years ago, give or take, they decided to create a system that would integrate five previously separate unique systems into one. And really the main reason for this was to improve the quality of life of the patients and their caregivers on ventilators. So, you know, the challenge really is you had to bring five therapies that would typically be, you know, separate machines and combine them into a single device. It had to be portable, easy to use, and, you know, have broader availability to patients that needed it. So, to do this, they had to approach, you know, engineering and product development from a very different angle. You know, many of the components were being redesigned and built from scratch. You know, whether this is, you know, the physical switches, pumps, treatment elements, and even the electronics had to be redesigned to fit into a tight space. You know, the device itself was 75% lighter than all of the combined five units previously. And that meant it was much easier to transport. But again, it had some constraints, you know, given it was a smaller device. There was some ingenuity required to fit things in to adjust the UI and the display so everything fit and worked in a usable way. So, key to making this, you know, this product a success was that it had to be easy to use. You know, patients and caregivers really needed an interface that, you know, was comparable to what they were seeing on their smartphones. And since it was also a medical device, there was, you know, an extensive effort invested into the, you know, the UX, the usability and the safety of the user interface. And, you know, when you're spending this amount of time and resources into the user experience and design, you know, it's necessary that the software solution that you pick can accommodate all of this, but also allow for frequent design change and it had to make that easy. So, Storyboard was the tool chosen to help them overcome these challenges. And this was, you know, seven years ago when there wasn't a global pandemic. And, you know, what makes this story really impressive is how, you know, Ventek was able to react and pivot to help the fight against COVID-19. So, back in, you know, early March of 2020 during the initial COVID-19 outbreak in, you know, North America and sort of Europe and that part of the world, you know, Ventek was in communication with governors and, you know, state health officials. And, you know, they were discussing the critical immediate need for ventilators. And instead of developing something completely new, the company decided it was going to take the already proven platform and then really just sort of update it to be targeted towards some of the needs that the patients were seeing today. So, Storyboard was able to react. So, they were able to make design updates and add functionality and iteration to their touch screen. And this was all done in order to better serve the needs of the frontline medical staff fighting against COVID-19, you know. So, really at an incredible speed, Ventek was able to rapidly redesign, retest, revalidate this new UI. They were able to meet the FDA regulations and then start fulfilling large order capacities all within the first 30 days of the pandemic. And, you know, if you've ever worked in the medical industry or with people developing products, you know, you'll know how quick that is. And I was honestly blown away by this back in the spring. So, you know, really, truly an amazing story. Kudos to the team at Ventek and, you know, a nice showcase of what a tool that offers, you know, a workflow that really buys into this rapid HMI development and design and iteration can gain you. So, if we go back to this slide that I had earlier on in the presentation, you know, where I talked a little bit about some of our markets and I highlighted, you know, some of the customers that we've built products with. Really, all of the customers that you see here today were able to achieve their goals, their awards, their recognition, you know, because of the workflow, the rapid design features and functionality that Storyboard offers. And, you know, a few of the notable ones here, which I'll sort of work through and give you a quick chat about is, you know, Vorwork. You know, Vorwork, they won the prestigious Red Dot Design Award for the latest release of the Thermomix product. And if you're familiar with that, it is a, you know, a very impressive, you know, complex, guided cooking machine that blends, stirs, mixes, has connectivity options, downloadable recipes, you know, all of these things in one on the unit that you see there. And to get this product just right, you know, they were coming off the heels of an extremely popular and successful version of their previous Thermomix. So they had to test constantly, so frequent testing and iteration, you know. They were running devices with, you know, the latest UI look and feel testing, seeing what, you know, people thought how the cooking process went and then constantly iterating that back into development and, you know, this had to be done in order to make sure that this product met the high expectations they had, but also was successful in terms of user experience and, you know, brought new value to the product line. And we worked very closely with Vorwork on this and, you know, very, very proud of, you know, everything we were to help contribute for this fantastic product. Another great example, the Emerson Sensei thermostat you see there, it's got a few awards attached to it as well. And we engaged with our services department with Emerson and we were able to work in parallel with them. So we were building the UI based on sort of designs and feedback from Emerson and integrated directly with their engineering team. So, you know, every time we would do, we would do some work, we would make some features, we could test it and we could get direct feedback from them, iterate it in and ensure that the UI and the product was very, very high quality and very, very successful. You know, they even went so far as to say that we were the best third party they had ever engaged with and, you know, that's something that, you know, we're very, very, very proud of and, you know, that dedication to the design process and workflow is something that we feel really, really shines through. Another interesting product, the Stages Cycling Computer which you can see there. It's something, you know, there's a little bit of a cycling culture at Crank Software so obviously there was a lot of interest when this opportunity came up and we engaged with the team at Stages to help develop the UI and the platform for this cycling computer. And, you know, a neat little fact is that the Dash computer was on the bike of the rider who won Tour de France. So, you know, we'd like to think that, you know, we're the fastest GUI company on two wheels despite none of us being athletic enough to, you know, ride a bike that quickly. And finally, a famous soft drink company you can see there. The drink dispensers are prevalent in movie theaters, restaurants and I'm sure most of you have seen them but many of you have used them and interacted with them before. And the story is pretty interesting because we were able to help them bring a new UI to market when frankly they were heavily behind the schedule with a competitor's platform. There was a team of engineers working on this around 10 or so people and they just couldn't get the performance they wanted and they were not going to get the features in place to meet their deadlines. So, we engaged with them. We were able to work with their existing architecture and just replace the UI layer with Storyboard. We kept their existing infrastructure and backend and system logic in place and with less developers like around two compared to 10 we were able to get them to market. We gained them the performance they were looking for and had the features in that they wanted. And what's really interesting is that the improvement here was so dramatic that we were also then given the chance to retrofit some legacy machines in the field and these were machines that were previously thought to be end of life and we improved the performance on them and added new features and this provided new life to lots of the units in the field and if you're at all familiar with managing legacy units you can imagine the benefit of not needing to replace tens of thousands of units that are already out there and deployed. So, really good couple of customers there some stories and really the main reason of why we as a company are successful is the workflow that we offer and the points that we feel are really important when it comes to building a UI successfully. So, thank you for joining. I really hope these examples really help show the value of rapid GUI development and why it's important for you. These are things that you should consider regardless of what you're doing and without the features and workflow that Storyboard and Crank software offered the case studies we showed and talked about probably wouldn't be impressive and as successful as they are. So, in closing, products are judged heavily based on the experience they offer and the first reactions users have. So, you need to ensure that you meet the needs and expectations of your users in your UI and your GUI development strategy needs to be something that embraces iteration and supports this. So, once again, I'd like to thank you all for your time today. I hope you found this interesting and informative. I certainly really enjoyed it and we'll be doing some in-depth technical demonstrations at our virtual booth over the next few days and I'd love to invite you all to come and check it out. Myself and some of my colleagues will be around for live Q&A after the demos and I really look forward to meeting and chatting with you and learning about some of your projects. So, thank you very much and have a wonderful few days.