UI/UX Design
Lenovo AR Assist
Client: Lenovo
Role: Lead Designer
Project Type: Augmented Reality Aid
Hardware: Mobile, Tablet
OS: Android
Platform: Unity Engine
As part of the push for new technology and innovation within Lenovo, my team kickstarted a one-month MVP project for an augmented reality program to assist service technicians in the field. A skeleton crew of a project that was more experiment than product, our goal was to test how easily and quickly we could design and develop a usable AR program capable of identifying the internal structures of a complex server.
The thought was that if you could augment the knowledge of a technician in real-time, you could rely on complex work to be done by less inherently skilled technicians. The dream, as far as augmented reality functions go.
Through break-neck research and development, we crafted an application with a self-contained and optimized user experience and functional software that could be used to test the waters with customers and agents in the future. We worked in open-source Unity and with several data stream applications to bring the MVP to life.
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have removed & altered any confidential information in this portfolio entry.
As the vision designer on the project, it fell to me to design not only what the engineers would be programming, but what to prioritize as essential to the experience.
Conceptual Design
Painting a Picture of the Future
With such a small team of experts, the creation of AR Assist started with explanation and justification. The concept, vetted and sound, needed to be explained to our peripheral company in order to gain access to the resources we needed to succeed. With the average discussion about the project began with “Wait, how is VR different than AR?”, I knew it was necessary to create high-fidelity conceptual mock-ups. Establishing how to best articulate an augmented application while making it exciting meant pulling visual design cues from places like Marvel’s Iron Man and streamlining them down to remain functional and reduce visual clutter meant to look ‘cool’.
My Role
As our team was only myself and a hand-full of developers, I took reigns of the project early after being briefed with user stories and requirements and set the stage for the design & development of the application. I took ownership of the product and started with not only educational mock-ups, but drafted user flows and refined developed prototypes with daily SCRUM feedback on the live prototype and daily creation of new graphical and UI assets for the developers to use.
Development & Testing
Augmenting Knowledge in Real-Time
Although the layout of the core application was created to be minimal as to save time, the layout and design of the actual augmented functions was essential to the success of the project and testing as a whole. There was precious little in the way of established customer experience guidelines for how we were meant to handle augmented reality overlays, doubly so on something as visually complex as a massive server.
Testing and interviews with users directed me to a design that took as many visual notes from wayfinding applications as it did from engineering ones. The "‘pin drop’ label look and highlighting made for subtle cues for users to wade through without getting overwhelmed, and without overwhelming the graphics card of the phone or tablet it was running on. Green proved to be the color that worked best at popping out without being too high contrast and causing confusion in the visual field of users, and mostly opaque name tags allowed them to navigate through the object-dense server hardware quickly and easily.
The UI as designed is far from perfected, but as a first-pass and prototype for testing this new technology, it worked wonderfully and taught me huge amounts of information on how to design for augmented reality in the future.
Project Completion & Hand-Off
Introducing AR Assist to the World
By every metric the team had established, the AR Assist experiment was a huge success. Our back-end architecture was a solid construction capable of assessing an entire portfolio of products in real-time, while the map of the application itself allowed for it to be easily adapted and tested in a number of business units and scenarios. User testing of the UI design showed that the minimal, linear design was immediately recognizable by users and created the least visual obstruction possible.
I’m proud to say that our findings and established standards have laid the seeds for dozens of other teams off to use the same technology.
