Industry Insights Blog Series
Imagine this scenario: With just a week remaining before the launch of your latest motorcycle, your engineers deploy a prototype to the dashboard system. Unfortunately, a critical memory limitation was overlooked, causing the display to crash during real-world testing. As a result, the prototype must be recalled, and the launch is delayed. Meanwhile, your competitor releases a similar feature—successfully and on time.
In the micro-mobility sector, the winners aren’t the biggest or cheapest; they are the fastest to deliver the features that differentiate their products. Every hour saved in development translates into a critical market advantage. However, this need for urgency must also confront shifting consumer expectations and an evolving regulatory landscape.
Today’s consumers expect smartphone-grade experiences from their vehicles’ displays. Connectivity, navigation, and crisp animations are desired for a premium look-and-feel. Additionally, they expect their machines to have the newest features, while regulatory bodies around the world are mandating stringent standards for safety and accessibility, mandating additional testing and quality assurance requirements also on the software side. The complexity of the supply chain is another challenge potentially impacting time-to-market, with OEMs relying heavily on a variety of suppliers for their components.
The micro-mobility sector needs to deliver products that blend reliable functionality with production agility. And the only way to do that is to prototype at breakneck speed without sacrificing quality.
Why Rapid Prototyping Matters
Manufacturers and suppliers must iterate rapidly, have shorter feedback loops, and ultimately, get their products ready for market faster. Instead of going through one iteration per month, teams need multiple design cycles in the same timeframe, with each cycle making the product smarter, safer, and more UX-focused. They also need to uncover possible integration issues, reducing downstream development rework while accelerating launch readiness.
With AI being integrated into different workflows, one can expect a future where AI feedback accelerates prototyping with real-time alerts in the design tools warning of memory issues, or automatic suggestions that simplify animation curves to meet resource constraints, all without any code being written. However, presently compressing timelines doesn’t come without challenges. When porting UI software or entire HMIs to new devices—for example, trying to reuse a previous solution on new models—a major hurdle is the fragmentation of hardware and tooling.
Vendor-specific and proprietary platforms make switching from one type of hardware to another a laborious process, with product development teams having to learn entirely new tools unique to a particular vendor. On the software side, open-source solutions tend to lack the stability required for production-grade performance, with new versions potentially incompatible with previous ones. This means development teams spend time and resources dealing with integration issues and end up with a product that is hard to maintain on the market.
This is where a unified development environment becomes essential, one that supports rapid prototyping and seamless transition into production-grade deployment.
Each microcontroller and microprocessor vendor has their own toolchain. If you're prototyping on hardware vendor A and then switch to hardware vendor B, you essentially have to learn a whole new system. And the process repeats itself with each new tool. Without the right tools, it is a real pain point with too many learning curves to tackle.
Bridge the Gap from Mock-Up to Working Prototype
As the micro-mobility industry chases market velocity, designers bear the brunt of taking a pretty mock-up to a working prototype without drowning in manual asset wrangling. As an example, the Figma Design platform allows designers to create UI mockups collaboratively and to share them with stakeholders in real time, shortening the feedback loop. However, the manual process of converting Figma designs into code may still take months.
This is where Qt Bridge for Figma comes to the rescue by radically transforming that workflow. This plug-in allows designers to export artboards directly into Qt Design Studio, where they are automatically converted into QML-based functional prototypes. Rapid prototyping is achieved by iterating on this process of porting design updates to Qt Design Studio projects. Once the functional UI meets the requirements, it can be deployed to the target device using the same underlying framework with Qt Creator IDE or exported to 3rd Party tools, allowing developers to test functionality on the target hardware.
In turn, Qt Design Studio improves team collaboration. By offering a low-code environment for UI design, it offers designers and technical artists an environment for bringing their visions to reality. The ability to visually edit the UI layout and see the QML changes in parallel offers an easy way, even for non-coders, to tweak performance to the single pixel. For this reason, Qt Design Studio reduces the barrier between designers and developers and gives the two teams a shared language to iterate faster.
A big challenge is taking a Figma design and getting it to run on an actual device. In many workflows, without the right tools, this is still a manual and time-consuming process. Exporting individual assets, reconstructing layouts, and optimizing for embedded performance can take months.
Rapid Prototyping with Qt:
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Automatically convert designs into functional code.
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Create transitions, interactions, and animations without the need to code.
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Preview full UI over web technology.
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Utilize a common environment for design and development teams.
Typically, designers are not supposed to code. But with QML, even they can make adjustments. We’ve seen real-world cases where this reduces development cycles from months to less than a week.
Ensuring Performance on Diverse Platforms
Rapid prototyping must scale across diverse hardware ecosystems. Qt6 and Qt for MCUs provide a consistent API layer for the developer to write their UI code once while handling all the low-level details like display drivers, memory maps, or touch controllers for supported boards. The QML code written for resource-constrained MCUs can run on more performant MPUs, which is essential in a market where price points vary drastically.
With UIs developed to perform across diverse hardware, ensuring quality and reliability from prototype to final vehicle is crucial to meeting both high user expectations and strict safety standards. Here, Qt Group’s Quality Assurance offering responds, for example, with Squish, a GUI test automation tool that validates that every interaction performs as designed and renders accurately on the actual target displays.
As UIs grow in complexity with more features, menus, languages, and more, robust testing is also key. Squish offers comprehensive solutions for MPU-based systems (often using Qt6) and Squish for MCUs for resource-constrained microcontrollers. Automated regression testing allows development teams to iterate with confidence, ensuring error-free updates, upholding product quality, and accelerating time-to-market.
Qt Framework and Qt for MCUs:
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Provide a single, consistent API for deployment across multiple microcontroller platforms.
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Handle low-level hardware details like display drivers and memory configurations, abstracting away board-specific quirks.
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Simplify scaling prototypes to production and ensure consistent performance across diverse hardware setups.
As the competition in the micro-mobility sector increases, rapid prototyping has become the baseline. With Qt Group’s solutions for integrated design-to-code conversion, automated testing, and cross-platform compatibility, OEMs and suppliers in the micro-mobility sector can move faster than ever before, turning bold ideas into ride-ready prototypes.
Explore our products today, try Qt online, or reach out to us to see how we can speed up prototyping in the micro-mobility business.
Learn more about Qt in Micro-Mobility.
Time is more valuable than money. When I ask OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers which is more important, they often answer time, because if you’re first to market, you already have the edge.