6 Ways to Get Your Creative Team to Work Faster & Better On AR
About a month ago a client — a major home improvement retailer (MHIR) — approached our team at Huge, a user-centered experience agency. They tasked us to apply AR technology to their shopping funnel to see how it could make for a more immersive experience for their shoppers — and hopefully increase conversion. From design to presentation, we utilized MHIR’s own shopping funnel as our organizational system for grouping concepts. The project gave the team an opportunity to explore a new creative process and learn valuable lessons about AR along the way.
Since it’s a brand new technology, we found it required us to rethink the old 2D methods of ideation and consider how our approach applied to 3D spatial paradigms. The following are some of the best practices we discovered that helped us get the most and best ideas out of the team when problem-solving for AR.
Design
- Close the laptops.
Pull out the sharpies and paper — literally go back to the drawing board. Apply the art-school approach to your creative team and challenge them to draw several different AR concepts by hand. Our team drew 10 concepts each of how MHIR’s shoppers could utilize 3D space via AR to better browse and shop within their app. By using analog tools we were able to “break things quickly”, as we say at Huge, to rapidly eliminate what isn’t working and focus on the ideas that are.
What software isn’t good at is concepting quickly and loosely. Their pristine artboards make it hard not to accept perfection. The vast number of options can distract you from your core idea. Their two-dimensional nature constrains you to a flat way of thinking. An added bonus to paper and pen is that it naturally allows for collaboration. While presenting our ideas, it was much easier for the team to grab their own sharpie and add notes or scribbles directly on the ideas. By allowing for a quick method of putting thoughts down on paper, you make it easy for your team to understand each other and even easier for the designers to take the edits and run with them.
2. Utilize 3D thinkers.
For the best variety of ideas during brainstorming, supplement your UX designers by tapping into the minds of teammates who are well versed in 3D space and technology. We recruited the help of an architect and an industrial designer, and their contributions were invaluable.
The architect quickly modeled and 3D printed a chair so she could study how the AR interface might change or interact as a user approached or encircled the product with their phone. Her 3D background naturally helped her conceive ideas we hadn’t thought of and gave us a new perspective. By focusing on architectural considerations — like eye level, human scale, and Z depth — she helped us find new ways to turn 2D online shopping into an immersive 360-degree experience.
The industrial designer’s background was in VR experiences. Because of this, his concepts gave us the first look at how AR could truly transform the way we shop online. He was able to conceive new ways of browsing and comparing products from past HoloLens projects. His work showed us that even the smallest aspects of the experience — like the menu or product list — have room for innovation when you change your approach.
3. You don’t need AR to prototype AR.
We needed to validate our ideas quickly before the presentation so we chose a tool we all knew well: After Effects. Showing your users is more valuable than telling them, so it doesn’t matter which tool you use as long as you’re able to create motion studies that bring your concepts to life. The best tool is always the one your team is most familiar with, and the concept itself will dictate which one is needed.
Choosing a tool we were familiar with gave us the advantage of speed. We were able to show testers several quick prototypes and get accurate feedback in days with simple in-phone animations. The testing quickly illuminated areas for improvement in our concepts, making them exponentially better than they had been.
Presentation
4. Use your client’s knowledge to your advantage.
AR may be commonplace to designers, but it’s still a new technology to those outside of our industry. To help clients grasp your concepts be sure to utilize terms, structures and names they’re already familiar with — wherever possible.
Just like how we organized our concepts when presenting internally, the team again used the shopping funnel to present to the client. This helped ground them in their own vernacular while utilizing a grouping method they had known for years. Going forward with AR was much easier after they understood where they were in the overall shopping flow.
5. Video killed the wireframe star.
This is the most powerful tip to use and the easiest to pull off. Before you introduce each concept to the client, preface it with video examples. They don’t have to be perfect AR app examples. Our team found that even recordings of video games or movies sufficed in explaining 3D ideas to our client so that by the time we showed them a wireframe they knew exactly how our idea worked.
For one of our more innovative concepts, we wanted to explain that a user would be interacting with 3D buttons hovering next to products. Knowing it would be difficult to show this, we front-loaded it with video showing a nearly identical paradigm used in a HoloLens application. When we got to our wireframes, we were able to breeze through it easily with the client and ourselves on the same page.
If you can’t find a great example, you can also use Keynote to animate your wireframes. Any kind of motion, as long as it’s a good approximation of your concept’s experience, will help the presentation. Our team animated several wireframes quickly and easily within Keynote to help get our ideas across. Those ideas became some of their favorites.
6. Prepare, prepare, prepare…
The old adage goes: “people fear what they don’t understand.” It’s true with technology. To combat personal biases, come to the presentation with real world examples that challenge clients’ fear of new tech ideas. There’s a 99.9% chance you will face this in your first AR presentation.
Before we showed the client our work, we spent an entire day thinking through all the questions and challenges our clients would have. For each, we prepared a rebuttal that was grounded in actuality. It worked tremendously well when the client asked whether we thought a radical new interaction we were proposing would ever be adopted. Our example: the selfie. By referencing how it went from an obscure and almost awkward interaction to something even our grandparents do, our underlying message won the client over: you have to take risks if you want to be innovative.
The project taught everyone — from designer to director — how to shift their creative process to accommodate AR. The biggest benefit of this is that our team can record these for our next AR engagement. And we can present our findings throughout Huge so other teams will know how to proceed even before they’re on an AR project, avoiding the roadblocks we experienced before they happen.
My biggest takeaway was the value of curiosity. Instead of giving up at each challenge we instead became curious to find another, better way to do what we were trying to accomplish. It allowed us to consider 3D printing, pair up with unexpected teammates, or dig deep into our repertoire of tools to find a simple means of prototyping. Stay curious and reconsider your process for some of the best results from your team.
