Reflective essay on my first prototype
By: Vjola Velikaj
Tags: Immersive, Design Thinking, Prototyping, Design, Reflections

The prototype’s demo

A few days ago, our design group finally presented virtually to the rest of the class the design project prototype, XPLANT. Bringing the prototype to its current form was quite a challenge for everyone involved, and we learned a lot throughout the process. The design project is called XPLANT (X refers to “nearly eXtinct”) and its main intent is to raise awareness amongst students around environmental issues that concern the world today, with the help of built-in AR functionalities. Besides that, the app also aims to encourage social interactivity on campus between students who use the app.

In this piece, I’m going to give you some high-level details about the project, my roles in the design team, followed by a reflection on strengths and weaknesses of the final prototype, and eventually some final lessons from the design process. In good hopes that you have already watched through the demo link provided at the start of the document, I will briefly show you what the prototype is made of and the design decisions behind it.

XPLANT is the prototype that was developed for the design project by our group in the course Introduction to Design for Creative and Immersive Technology. The design vision for this project consists particularly in a mobile app that will help students to become aware of environmental challenges of today’s world, while socially interacting with their peers. Some of the main functionalities of the app feature the AR integration to create a more interactive and immersive experience.

We were was based on Houde & Hill’s triangle model to create the prototype. After a constructive discussion about the aim of the prototype, the team decided that the aim of the prototype should be answering questions about the look and feel and at a lesser extent, the role of the final app (Houde & Hill, 1998). The demo for the prototype was developed in the form of a short video. It contains two main components that focus on the UI and the AR capabilities. Why did we focus solely on those aspects? And how do they serve to the purpose of the prototype?

The reason for that lies in the composition of our design team. One can easily assume that the skillset of each member in a multi-disciplinary design team is quite diverse. This is also the case with our design group. All members of the design team belonged to different backgrounds such as: project management, software testing, user research and product building. According to Houde & Hill (1997), even the term “prototype” is likely ambiguous on such a team. Selecting the focus of a prototype is the art of identifying the most important open design questions (Houde & Hill, 1997).

From the beginning up till the final day of the project deliverables, each member of the group would take on the tasks that they would feel more confident about, while as per the other tasks left to do: we read, researched and improvised upon, with the intention to always deliver the best results. Nonetheless, we relied a lot on previous experience and the tools the members felt more competent working with.

With that being said, the following gives an overview regarding the technicalities of the prototype, which as well implies the description of my role in the prototype development.

The UI workflow of the prototype was based on the user stories which were created with the ‘Persona’ in mind. On the other hand, the AR based functionalities of our prototype were developed using Unity 3D. The group tried to use different tools for different purposes, so they will not be dependable on each other. I managed to materialize these user stories in the form of functionalities and workflows, which resulted in the UI components developed in Adobe XD. This was my most significant contribution to the development of the prototype, but there are other roles I was able to cover in the design process.

Most of the time I facilitated the team meetings and the communication between team members. Worth mentioning at this point is that I also handled the presentations regarding the content and visuals. In the early stages of the design project I tried to push the team members to have an innovative and “out of the box” thinking during our brainstorming sessions and decision-making moments. Maybe this is the reason that our initial design project idea was not feasible for its context of use and too complex to be developed within the course’s timeframe.

On a different note, it is always a good idea to do a retrospective on what is done. As already stated earlier, the prototype delivered a set of features that concerns the role and look and feel of the final product. After an honest evaluation to our team’s work and the final delivery of the prototype, I was able to come up with a set of strengths and weaknesses of our prototype with respect to its purpose:

Using the ‘Persona’ technique, as part of the user research methodologies helped us get a better perspective of what the users might want. Regardless of the current situation (COVID-19, distance learning) and the lack of the real user’s touch, we managed to create a set of possible features to be delivered. The ‘Persona’ helped us imagine how different types of users would like to interact with app and what the context of use would be. This technique helped our prototype be relatable at some extent for the presentation’s audience. Using different tools for different components of the prototype, helped the prototype to be developed independently from the tools. The course instructors highly suggested that we used Unity 3D for the development of our prototype, but unable to deliver the best we could, the team decided to rely on other tools we felt more confident to work with. The prototype was developed with Adobe XD for the UI functionalities and Unity 3D for the AR functionalities. In the end, it was put together in the form of a short video to create a seamless experience for the audience. It is one of the strengths of our prototype because at any given time the team can discard or add more components developed with different tools to the final prototypes. The prototype does not rely on only one skill to be successfully delivered. What is significant is not what media or tools were used to create them, but how they are used by a designer to explore or demonstrate some aspect of the future artifact (Houde & Hill, 1997). However, for specific features, such as AR capabilities, the use of complex tools and scripted language is required. The AR capabilities were used in a mindful way to deliver the intended immersive functionalities. However, I would say that the development of AR functionalities in our prototype is both a strength and a weakness based on how you see it. It is a strength based on the questions it is trying to address:

- Is this an immersive app?

Yes.

- What aspects of the app are going to be augmented?

Plants (3D objects).

- How is it going to looks like?

The prototype gives you an idea of look and feel.

Clearly, the AR capabilities are used for a certain purpose, but I still believe that the immersive experience of the prototype could have been more significant. This could have been achieved by the development of more AR-based features, in order to give a full experience of the augmented objects and some form of interaction with them. The team should have put more focus and effort into developing these features. No proper user evaluation is probably one of the factors that affected the quality of our prototype. Not being able to get a real feedback from the users in the context it was designed for, made our prototype feel relatively abstract and not relatable enough. We tried to do user evaluation inside the design team, but it is surely not effective as we are greatly biased by the designer’s perspective. We could have solved this issue by expanding our circle of testers to our friends and neighbors. Even though they are not the target user, it is somehow a less biased group of users for evaluating the prototype. There are insufficient aspects of interactions being addressed. The prototype might sometimes leave the audience confused about how different aspects of interaction between users and the environment are handled. The prototype should have had a higher precision on what every functionality aims and how it is handled. The design vision is vague when you look at the prototype. This is a fundamental problem that has its roots in the earliest stages of the design processes. The design team should have worked more diligently on the design vision of the project idea and to try to find more ‘common sense’ and tangible features to be developed for the final prototype.

One similar app that is quite close to our XPLANT design vision is IKEA AR App. Its purpose is different, and it aims at a different target user group. One is more social focused and the other one is for commercial use. But what makes these apps similar is the look and feel of the prototype. They both have the AR-based functionalities of placing objects in a specific area which aims at creating an interactive and immersive for the users. Also, from what I can understand, the implementation techniques needed for these apps would be similar.

All in all, this design group project has helped me learn a lot about many aspects of a design product. The project went through an agile design process, from brainstorming, to operative images, to prototyping while complying with the theoretical design knowledge from the literature. Under unprecedent circumstances, we managed to deliver a viable prototype that satisfies its purpose, but that undoubtedly, could be better. Among other things, this group project put me in a real-life scenario mindset where I had to deal with strict deadlines, impactful design decisions, teamwork, and constructive collaboration. I am aware that evaluating your own work can be a difficult activity, but I still managed to identify some of the strengths and weakness of our own prototype by keeping an open eye and mind about it. The reflective process in the end of it, was one of the most significant activities, because it’s helped me realize the growth throughout this process.

References:

Houde, S. & Hill, C., 1997. What do prototypes prototype? In: M.Helander, T.K. Landauer, P. Prabhu, eds. 1997. Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction . 2nd ed. North Holland. Ch.16.