Insight AOD Case Study
Overview
- Insight AOD transforms time from dawn into a visible color bar. The pattern is driven by Mobile use time data, every time when unlocked, it will leave a groove on the bar. The longer is the utility time, the wider is the groove and vice versa. Through the insight of those grooves, users may see their digital life pattern and make self-reflection accordingly.
- The Insight AOD is jointly designed by OnePlus & students from Parsons School of Design. We took those future artists’ blue-sky ideas and made them matured products with appealing stories.
- Insight AOD was scored 4.2 out of 5 from our user survey, the highest scored feature in OxygenOS 11. The usage rate is 17.9%, the no.2 clock in 11 AOD clocks.
- I worked with visual designer Chiehyu from the early audition to the final concept in this project, and I mentored Chiehyu to complete the final design.
The birth of the concept
AOD is a crucial area we started to work on OxygenOS 11. Considered the resource we may have, our strategy is to create a decent amount of “artworks” instead of many clock styles. We invited students from Parsons School of Design to design an AOD that has never been made before together.
Here are some of their cool raw ideas:
Turns raw ideas into a matured product — These raws ideas are very creative and wild that in-house designers can hardly come out with; from a matured product’s point of view, the shortage on the usability, feasibility, cognitive over-load are apparent there too.
We first started to identify and extract the fresh ideas we like from these raw ideas — The unique shape of the clock, the data visualization approach, and the fusion of the clock style and the valuable data.
The statement — We found most of these young generation designers care about the digital wellbeing issue very much. Amount of unlocks, history of the unlocks, phone usage are the topics showing in their ideas often. We must keep their statements.
Let the most important message stand out — A long vertical clock bar of “Event + Unlocks + Time” caught our eyes immediately. Other than its unique shape, it can also show users where you’re in a day at a glance. But the mixing of too much info and the visual pieces makes the most important message hidden in too many messages. We removed the data of events and simplified those horizontal lines into grooves on the bar.
Great appealing — The last and the very crucial step is to make it great appealing. Beautiful things always win. Inspired by the OnePlus 8T data wallpaper we previously worked on, Chiehyu created a beautiful color bar reflecting the daylight color change. Now we have every piece to tell a good story:
“In 24 hours of a day, every wake makes it a masterpiece.
Insight, jointly designed by OnePlus & students from Parsons School of Design, transforms time from dawn into a visible color bar. The pattern is driven by Mobile use time data, every time when unlocked, it will leave a groove on the bar. The longer is the utility time, the wider is the groove, and vice versa. Through the insight of those grooves, see the digital life of yours.”
Execution
We didn’t have too much trouble with the implementation. The challenge we faced was mainly on the demonstration illustration.
As mentioned previously in the article, our goal is to make a unique artwork instead of a clock style. We only have the name to show below the clock styles before, but a name won’t tell the story behind the artwork. We added a demonstration pop-up to share the story. To explain how the Insight AOD works in a small rectangle box stuck Chiehyu for almost a week. We then dived into this problem together, and what took us out was the essence of how a dialog box should work. We focus too much on the graph; we wanted it to show everything. But the truth is the illustration is only to help the reading of our demonstration. We should focus on those complicated parts of the demonstration that are not easy to explain simply in words.
Iteration
Our users love the story we tell and the statement on Digital Wellbeing. But in the real context, constantly showing the unlock times on the AOD is too stressful. So make the unlock times only appear when users pick up the device. As users are\ about to unlock the device, the connection is more straightforward too.
Looking back…
- It seems we lack a place for users to check their data history or the data detail. When the graph only shows up one time, it’s just a piece of data visualization artwork. When we accumulate the data of what’s happened every day, it’s then users’ memory, and many potential opportunities may show up.
- When we have turned a clock into beautiful artwork, we should make it sharable. This can increase the product exposure and fulfill users’ essential needs — share something cool.
