Petteri Holländer, senior vice president of ventures at Qt Group, discusses how Qt Accelerate is transforming UI/UX development with rapid prototyping and minimal code – from concept to market in just a week
Can you elaborate on how Qt Accelerate differs from traditional UI/UX development tools?
The difference with Qt Accelerate is that it gives companies all the essential tools and services they need to deploy high-quality products with little to no custom code required. You don’t necessarily need a full team of software engineers, hardware experts or designers. If you have an idea, then Qt Accelerate represents a promise to get that idea from concept to market in a week. Normally when you’re developing UI/UX for, say, an infotainment system in a car, there’s a lot of code and design involved and those elements need to communicate with each other – that is to say, any changes to the code could impact the design and vice versa.
How does Qt Accelerate address the unique challenges faced by EV manufacturers in UI/UX development?
The main way Qt Accelerate addresses challenges for EV manufacturers is by massively speeding up the time it takes for them to prototype new ideas for human-machine interfaces in their vehicles. Time is money, which is true not just for EV manufacturers but any company building a digital product. When you’re prototyping or iterating on any digital product in a competitive landscape, you need to move quickly. You don’t necessarily want to spend loads of time and money on a full complement of software engineers and designers to mock up a proof-of-concept infotainment system in your car. Typically, switching to an entirely new development framework may severely impact production in many aspects that range from talent to hardware, which impacts time-to-market and costs. That’s where Qt Accelerate comes in. It’s the quick-start solution.
What kind of support or collaboration does Qt Group provide to EV manufacturers during the integration of Qt Accelerate?
In a boot camp that lasts less than a week, Qt experts work alongside designers, engineers and the product team to bring their vision to reality. When we start the boot camp, they already have a working prototype that is 90% complete, with a clear path to taking the solution to market. The boot camp just helps them finalize customizations to their design system, branding and selected functionality. Our goal is to eventually condense the boot camps down from one week to one to two days.
How does Qt Accelerate ensure compatibility with the diverse hardware and software ecosystems in electric vehicles?
Qt Accelerate is built on the same Qt framework that is well known for its cross-platform compatibility and scalability. With the Qt framework, we give developers a way to write code once, which they can then deploy across multiple platforms like iOS, Android, Windows, macOS and Linux without any significant changes. It saves a lot of time on platform-specific adaptations and ensures development is really consistent across all platforms. It’s the same concept for how we’re using Qt Accelerate. We’ve tailor-made the tool to be compatible with devices in consumer electronics, industrial automation and automotive use cases, though we intend to add more compatibility as time goes on.
Qt Accelerate claims that it can achieve 90% readiness in a day. What does this readiness encompass, and how does Qt Accelerate streamline the final 10%?
The industry solutions Qt Accelerate provides are currently 90% ready for common use cases. Some functionality and use cases are rather standard across industries. Think of coffee machines, for example – they have a set of predefined actions a user can take, which the HMI should enable. The templates in Qt Accelerate cover this. The remaining 10% is brand and look-and-feel customization mainly, and the possibility to add special features.
Clean Motion reportedly developed a vehicle interface in one week. Could you walk us through how Qt Accelerate enabled this rapid development?
We started by giving Clean Motion a range of pre-designed templates that were specifically tailored for their EV’s HMI development. The included support for microcontrollers and real-time OS allowed Clean Motion to achieve a highly cost-effective solution that was 90% ready. It just needed customization in terms of the design system, branding and selected functionality. We ran a one-week boot camp with the team to help them through this process. Our goal is to condense these bootcamp sessions down to one to two days. The other benefit of Qt Accelerate is that, since it’s built on our Qt framework, it enjoys the same cross-platform scalability that we’re known for. This means that Clean Motion could reuse the current solution on more powerful hardware for any of their future vehicles.
Are there other EV manufacturers or startups currently using or testing this solution?
Yes. One example is Donutlab. In the micromobility and marine sector, Foilone is another example.