Augment Your Space: a location-based Augmented Reality (AR) Information Sharing Tool
Usability Engineering Class Project
This was a class project designed for us to focus on the four different stages of the usability process: Analyze, Design, Implement, Evaluate.
Augmented reality was our focus for this project and we began with a literature review on current AR technology applications to understand the associated pros and cons with their various uses.
Initial ideas included an application that would document and share knowledge regarding different items and heirlooms around a house. This theme of knowledge sharing was central to analysis phase of our project.
A Gift for Athena AR application at the British Museum <http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/125475-the-british-museum-and-samsung-bring-augmented-reality-to-museum-learning>
Matt Davis, Derek Ho, Stephanie Mencia, Missie Smith
Affinity Diagram
To gain an outside perspective regarding the capabilities of augmented reality, our team held an affinity diagram session with interested participants to develop and identify potential insights, problems, and solutions one would expect to have with AR.
Performing this step helped provide us with a prioritization of different features to focus on, such as: visual features, sharing/tagging, information gathering, security, notifications, etc.
Lab Tour Application
To narrow the scope of focus on this application, we wanted to focus on a design-thinking paradigm which caused us to shift the scope of the application from a household device to a laboratory tour setting.
Visitors would be able to view details on the various projects happening in the lab. Papers, videos, posters, related professor and researcher information would all be accessible to all interested parties.
A special focus on social and cultural aspects of how the application would be used during periods of interaction was important to remember when beginning the design phase. This would effectively help walk the user through a unique experience instead of a cookie-cutter tour recited repeatedly.
Personas and Storyboards
Personas were developed to help further identify the target audience of this application during our design phase. After identifying certain individuals that could use an application of this sort, we settled on a prospective graduate student as our main persona to design for.
Storyboards were developed to define the flow and architecture of the application in the manner of how a graduate student would use it.
(Some) Screenshots of Prototype
Prototype
Evaluation
Axure was used to develop a prototype with limited functionality for pre-identified walkthroughs and scenarios.
A cognitive walkthrough of our application was performed in class to determine if heuristics were met. Introduction and discussion over proposed heuristics for the AR domain included:
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Fulfills purpose of design
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Expands on what can already be seen in real world
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Accuracy of augmentation
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Engagement
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Useful scope of application
An empirical evaluation was purposely not performed as the professor wanted all projects to go through an analytical evaluation when presented to class.
Lessons Learned for AR application development
While the application's purpose of storage and transfer of knowledge of the physical environment was met, areas of improvement I recognized when developing AR applications include:
Make navigation items more clear and obvious to users. Despite having a tutorial video, users were confused by software application navigation as we did not use the hardware interface for our prototype.
Provide feedback/response to user. Due to limited functionality from focus on specific scenarios and walkthroughs, users became confused when certain functions were not available and the system did not provide any response or feedback- in essence nothing happened. In the future even if an item's full function is not available, still have a response alerting the user of the lack of functionality.