FINAL PROJECT
What is Leap Motion?
Entrepreneurial Design
In Entrepreneurial Design, we are inching towards a final project around mental health and empathy. We want to design an immersive installation that gives participants an inkling depression’s impact on a person’s everyday life.
For this, we have to build visceral experience. We are iterating on the idea of various rooms or stations, in which a participant completes simple tasks. Each is implicitly designed to evoke subtle physical stress and mental frustration.
Onboarding
This week, my job has been to sketch out some quick ideas on how to welcome participants into the installation. In my readings, I’ve discovered that onboarding is meant to give users immediate value, being careful to design each step for the user without leaving the user with the burden of completing a job the designer should have done herself.
Onboarding is also meant to improve the user’s life. Or better said, as a designer I should present onboarding by saying here’s what you can do with our product. Not look how cool this feature is. “People don’t buy the product. They buy better versions of themselves”. Buffer
“People don’t buy the product, they buy the better version of themselves”. Buffer
Leap Motion as a contender
Leap Motion is an interesting way of engaging the user through tech. Rather than asking survey questions via a paper and pencil , it could be done with Leap Motion. Users could move their hands to select answers to questions on a screen. They could swipe left to move between pages.
“The Leap Motion Controller is an optical hand tracking module that captures the movements of your hands with unparalleled accuracy”, according to its website.
In short, it’s a hand tracking technology.
On the other hand, critics have called Leap Motion a gimmick, without a fundamental purpose. I can see that being true. After all I don’t want to distract my participants with tech; I want to engage them on the serious topic of depression and empathy.
There is a Leap for the Oculus Rift. Whereas we do want to include a VR component later in the experience, including it in the onboarding would be severe overkill.
I’ll need to discuss with my teammates and my mentor to get a better sense of the best onboarding option for us. After all, onboarding sets the tone, and lets users engage immediately. Failing this, we lose traction.
Let’s see where this goes….
