From Confusion to Clarity: 2 Crucial Lessons I Learned in AR App Design
When it comes to designing for immersive technologies, clarity in providing the information is of utmost importance as not many people are well versed with Augmented & Virtual Reality.
I started my career as a UX team of one for an Immersive tech startup - WoWExp Technologies — just 2 years ago. During these 2 years, many of my design assumptions were put to rest. The more I interacted with people, the more I understood the challenges they faced while using AR and VR. In this article, I’m going to talk about 2 crucial lessons I learned while designing user-facing apps in the Augmented Reality domain (VR would be another article, for another day).
A brief about AR
For people who don’t know what Augmented reality is, let me explain it succinctly. Augmented Reality lets virtual objects to be projected or placed in the real environment which makes it seem that the object is a part of the real world. To illustrate, Snapchat filters are AR filters, and the famous PokemonGo is an AR game. Augmented reality has many benefits across different industries but that would again be an article for another day. So let’s not digress any further and dive into the 2 key lessons.
Lesson 1: Guide them
To better understand what I’m going to explain, let’s break down an AR process into small tasks. These tasks would be,
- Opening the camera
- Scanning the surroundings (or face in case of filters)
- Detecting the plane (or face)
- Spawning the object (or applying filters)
- Interacting with the spawned object
These tasks make up the whole AR process. Observing people during the research phase of design, the most frequent question asked while performing these tasks was “What to do next?”.
One effective solution that I could find was assisting the users with guided prompts. Every part of the process, however trivial it may seem, should be guided with prompts to reduce confusion and increase clarity. This is how I approach the tasks👇
- Prompt when the camera opens up: Move your camera slowly from left to right
- Prompt while moving camera: Scanning the surroundings
- Prompt when a plane is detected: Surroundings scanned
- Prompt to spawn the object: Tap on the plane to place the object
- Feedback (Toast message): Object spawned
- Interaction guide: Gestures for zoom, rotate, and resize (Accompanied by an animated icon)
- Give the option to reset the size of the object to the default
By providing these guided prompts, the confusion of “What to do next?” or “What to do now?” is significantly reduced. Now let’s see how we can improve this experience even further.
Lesson 2: Augment senses
Okay, so what does it really mean by augmenting senses? In Augmented Reality, virtual objects are placed in the real world, so designing the experience in a way that leverages other senses, would provide the best possible experience to the users. Let us take a look at how we can achieve this in our AR tasks,
- While moving the camera: Sound loop which denotes searching
- When a plane is detected: Alert sound on plane detection
- When the object is spawned: Haptic feedback on object spawn
Augmenting senses might seem trivial but it surely would take the user experience to next level.
In this section of the article, I won’t talk about design but something more philosophical (you can skip if not interested XD). During these initial 2 years of my design journey, I’ve learned quite a few things from interacting with people & fellow designers, from reading design articles & books (The UX Team of One, is my favourite book so far) and I’ve realized that learning is a symbiotic process. You become more confident if you teach and share your knowledge. This no way implies that I know all the things, but I am open to learn from the design savants that this world has. If you’re up for a “Get to know” session, then I’ll be more than happy, you can email me at dharam@duck.com! Thank you for reading till the end and bearing with me in the philosophical section. Your suggestions are most welcomed.
