Introduction
Digital Air was a 3 million dollar augmented reality startup in Bangkok, Thailand. The goal of the company was to create a new augmented reality social platform that would generate revenue through augmented reality advertising. During my time at the company, the design team spent a lot of time and energy thinking about how AR technology could be used to change the advertising industry, thinking about design that incorporates machine learning to offer targeted user ads, and the gamification possibilities of augmented reality.
My Role
I worked as a UX designer in the design team.
Customer insights & ideation
I would conduct user research with the other senior UX designer on the design team. We would take turns note taking and moderating.
Experience strategy & vision
I made prototypes and vision designs to evangelize with senior management.
design process creation
I gave advice and advocated for how research could be integrated with weekly sprints.
planning & scope definition
I would add user stories into the backlog whenever I saw that a design improvement could be made.
oversight & coordination
I coordinated with a UI designer, a PO, my UX lead, and front and back end developers.
design execution and validation
I designed user journeys, wireframes, and prototypes for the main app, client facing web application, and the company responsive website.
Digital air Platform
background info
The vision for the Digital Air platform was to become a personalized lifestyle app that impacted users’ at every point in their lives. For example, if you walked into a cafe and wanted to learn more about a bag of coffee beans, you could scan it and it would show basic information about the coffee beans. Another example would be if a user walks into a mall, they would get a notification on their phone and they would be able to see the special offers from the brands that they like.
I was not there for the initial phase of the app, since I joined the company a few months after it had been founded. The team wanted to encourage user generated content and so we wanted to build a platform where users could drop content like stickers, videos, and pictures at a specific location. Then, if another person walked past that location they would be able to see the content that other people have dropped. In addition, several features like the treasure hunt feature had already been part of the MVP. The treasure hunt allowed users or brands to put content at specific locations, and users would have to go to each location and find the content that had been dropped there. After completing the journey, there would be a prize reward that would be set by the user or brand. When I joined, the MVP was not finished and so I was able to contribute my own ideas to what the vision of the product should be.
Process
I worked in a design team of three, one design lead, one senior UX designer and I. Everyday work would range from ideation sessions using crazy eights, sketching, conducting user testing and surveys, preparing wireframes, talking with developers, talking with UI designers, conducting interviews with users outside, and many other things.
MVP
When I joined the company, the MVP feature list for the app was already set. The first feature was the drop feature. This involved users being able to drop content like stickers, voice recordings, photos, and videos at any location. The second feature was to enable users to make scavenger hunts with a reward for completion. The third feature was to enable users to add the dropped content to their inventory. Lastly, while users would generate some content, we also wanted to invite brands to generate content on our platform. Thus, while I did not come up with any of the features, I did help by working through the user flows with the design team, and helping with wireframes through Figma.
Full wireframes: click here
Prototype
View here
Challenges
There were a few main challenges we face when designing the app. One main challenge we faced was the maturity of AR technology, since we were constrained by having to use unity for our app. In addition, we relied on a preset triggers to activate our AR experiences. Another challenge we faced was a pivot from the product to helping 7-11 with integrating an AR experience into their app.
results
The app is not working anymore due to the company shutting down.
Swap heads user research
Background info
Since the main features for MVP were set by the time I joined the company, I spent my first two months helping either generating new ideas for the app or helping with another designer’s idea. This feature was spearheaded by one of the senior designers on the design team. The feature was to add one of the preset heads we would provide over the users face, similar to what Snapchat and Facebook messenger have. I helped him conduct the user research for this feature, and consolidate the findings into a report. Our UX lead then helped by arranging our findings in a more visually pleasing format that you see below.
Digital air website
During the first two months I also worked on our website redesign.
kickoff
Firstly, we had a kickoff meeting with all the relevant stakeholders to understand what things we wanted to deliver and to gather requirements.
Survey
After the meeting, the UX team performed a survey in the company premises with 8 participants. The scope of the survey was to assess what people in the company found to be the most compelling reasons they had for joining Digital Air, and to assess what fears they may have had before joining.
Concept
Primary focus of the website is to attract new talent while showing the culture, philosophy and values of Digital A.I.R. Since the company is still in partial stealth mode we do not want to show actual demos/examples, rather focus on our people, our workplace and our vision.
Based on the facts above the suggested approach is to weave a video narrative of a fictional employees first day at Digital A.I.R offices. This approach fulfills the following requirements:
Present our workplace and high standards of working conditions
Show our high vision and technology without unveiling too much information on our current and short term product goals
Establish us as storytellers and experience crafters
Express our family values and friendly people demeanor
Show our willingness to bring new people to join us
Initial ideation and & storyboarding
Storyline: An employee’s first day
It is the first day for a Digital Air employee and we want to show how AR integrates into their first time company experience. The employee enters the gate from outside of the house and the gate could be an AR gate/portal where they go from reality to a mixed reality experience. Once inside the office, he experiences various personalised and fun experiences like a logo welcoming them and showing them a map of the building, to adding new people to their contacts through a handshake. Moreover, we are presented with how AR makes our job easier, allows us to be more efficient and feel more connected (eg meeting with people here and avatars representing people who are dialing into the meeting).
Interaction suggestions
Social
Avatar to Avatar
Avatar A talks to Avatar B, and arranges a time for their humans to meet up at the local German pub later that evening. Avatar A asks Avatar B when their human is free and gives the times human A is free. They both agree on a set time due to both Avatars knowing when their humans leave work and like to eat.
Passes by someone else and sees his profile in AR
The first day employee is able to look at people passing by and meet and greet them due to seeing their profile over the top of their head. This helps the first timer remember everyone’s name. Other information could be contact information like email and phone number, social media feed, etc.
Shaking hands = Add friend
First timer meets someone and shakes hands with them. When shaking hands they both add each other to their contacts list. This can be done through movement (eg pumping up and down action three times adds someone) or through tapping the side of their hand. Then there is a friend added notification at the top of their heads
Utilitarian
Personalization - Logo can show welcome message (color orange)
First timer looks at the logo and sees a personalized message welcoming them to the company. The logo has some fun colors / cool animations (to be decided by creative team) and also has a map to show the first timer where they are in the building.
Mixed reality (4D) screens
1st scenario: New timer walks past meeting space and sees a meeting going on. Some of the attendees are physically present and some are avatars representing their humans who live in other countries and are dialing in. There is a main screen but also additional AR/mixed reality screens with useful information (data viz, business statistics) to augment the meeting.
Fun
Loch Ness monster (Or a marine animal like a whale) in pool
First timer walks in and see a loch ness monster emerging from/swimming in the pool. The loch ness monster looks at the camera, huffs and air comes out of its nostrils, and then turns and swims away. First timer then continues onward.
Salmon going up the fountain towards the logo
First timer sees salmon jumping out of the water and then the salmon starts climbing up the fountain. There are stones and rapids and the water is moving quickly.
other additional concepts we had
Wireframes
Wireframes done of the website are below.
toolkit
background info
After the first three months, I was assigned to work on the client facing application called the toolkit. The toolkit was a web application where brands could customize the different gamified experiences that we offered through different levels of customization depending on which subscription package companies would buy. My task was to design how brands would customize these gamified experiences. I worked directly with a PM, back and front end developers, and a UI designer to complete this task.
Goals
Design a web application where businesses could customize the various AR experience journeys the Digital Air app had
Account for the complexity of allowing some businesses to be able to completely customize the full experience journey.
Challenges
There were several challenges that I had to face from the very beginning. The requirement was to allow the top tier of paying customers a fully customized experience journey. For example, a company could do a treasure hunt where they pin several locations on a map and users would have to go to each location and search for an item that would only show up through the augmented reality on their phone. Hence, there were several factors that had to be considered such as location, the digital item that is dropped, steps, content, and a final prize. In addition, you could also split the journey in multiple flows, so not every user would go through the same journey. As a result, this added on a layer of complexity to this whole task.
Another challenge I had was getting target users to user test with. I did not have access to the amount of brand managers I would have liked, but I believe I did the best I could in light of this fact.
Ideation
I first started by looking at different products that had to tell a story with many different variables in it. One product I looked at was a video game designer tool that was targeted towards RPGs. I was curious at how they managed to design for this level of complexity. I also looked at various other products and at the end came up with two models. The first model was a form based page where users would enter in their information as it came up. The second model was one where the user would write the storyline of the journey into boxes, and then use lines to connect the story together just like a user flow. Then, the user could open up each box to edit the details inside.
After this ideation session, I made a paper prototype and did some guerilla testing on my coworkers in the office. I tested both models and the form based page tested better. At that time, I was also strongly leaning towards this model because my hypothesis was that the second model was quite complicated for the users who would be using this product.
To view the prototype click here
Results & hindsights
This product never made it live since the startup did not continue as a company. However, due to increasing complexities with the journey, the first model would not have been able to accommodate the level of customization that the business wanted.
On hindsight, even though the CEO wanted to first start with the more complex experiences, I probably should have advocated more strongly for first focusing on a few template experiences, since nothing was set in stone and then progressing to the more complex experiences.
7-11
Background Info
Digital Air had a partnership with 7-11 Thailand to help them redesign their app to include Augmented Reality features and gamification aspects. This was because 7-11 Thailand was looking for new and innovative ways to attract customers into their physical stores.
Goals
Increase the amount of customers coming into 7-11 physical stores
Integrate one of our AR journeys to provide an AR gamified experience to customers to encourage them to spend more in the store
Ideation
Firstly, we did an analysis of the information hierarchy in the 7-11 app and identified areas of overlap. Secondly, we then thought about the best entry point for our new AR feature on the home page of the app. Thirdly, we also thought about which of the AR experiences we had in the digital air app would work best in the 7-11 app. Since 7-11 already had a rewards system, we thought that our gamification user journey would work best for this.
wireframes
We then fleshed out how a user journey would work on a screen by screen basis. First we did sketches on paper and then progressed to a higher fidelity tool (Figma).
Full wireframes: click here
Results
Unfortunately, this design did not make it live due to our main investor pulling out. As a result, the 7-11 project never went forward.