Ubi-Interactive Augmented Reality Design

Preface

Ubi-Interactive is an Augmented Reality (AR) software which can turn any surface into a touchscreen. The design project talks about how to redesign the software for different use cases.

Among other things, the company watches online conversations, publications and articles for its clients. As part of their mission, consultants sends daily, weekly and monthly reports to its customers. 

Understanding User's Needs

In 2015, I worked in a startup company called Ubi-Interactive as a UX Desginer. We noticed that people need large touchscreen nowadays: teachers need that for classes; business need that for meeting and even family need a touchscreen for entertainment. Ubi-Interactive is the software meets user's needs in this aspect.

The project introduces the process how we designed a Seamless Interface Software which can turn any surface into a touchscreen within a camera sensor (i.e. Kinect). The first part of the project is to conduct user research and evaluation. It helps to find the use cases and keypoints of the software. The second part introduces the workflow and design details about the Seamless Interface Software. 

Understand the use cases and pain points in real

There are similar products in the market but they are used in different use cases. For example SMART and SHARP are touch whiteboard for education and Microsoft Surface Hub is touchscreen for business. Instead of tradition gesture interaction, these products always has its own "unique" gestures for some special interactions. Moreover, the software they used in the products are different. Because of this, our initial purpose is to design a good user interface for users to interact with whiteboard or LED screen without any obstacles. 

When I reviewed the previous software version that we did half year ago, I found some pain points about our products. For example, the functions are quit simple: tab, drag and zoom. However, from our consumers feedback, they want to use pen also. Moreover, some users may want to share the screen with others when they meet remotely with their customers. From the users feedback and competitive software analysis, I can narrow down what I want for future software version.

Defining clear objectives and scope

The research evaluation phase made it easier to define a scope for the project. Here are the main objectives of evaluation:

• design a concise and ease-use interface.
• define the gesture interactions can be accepted by users
• add more collaborative functions on the software
• add in-air gesture function and more platforms for special use cases

These objectives will be presented naturally to make the process of creating and designing software less tedious in the following report.