Lo-Tech Interaction Prototyping
Atheer Air - Atheer, Inc
Most of my career I've been a part of in-house design teams of very large, multinational firms. The opportunity at Atheer allowed me to experience something different, namely being a part of a small (<20 person) team where I was the sole design resource on staff.
The Atheer augmented reality experience was a blend of Kinect-style air gestures activated through a wearable visor that mapped digital information on top of a real world feed. The platform itself was running on a customized version of Android, with two overlapping displays that could project stereoscopic images to the wearer.
My core responsibility was to define the interaction design paradigms for the Atheer AiR platform at a system level, and help to prototype applications that would demonstrate the power of touch-free computing. Initially, the use-cases were oriented towards consumer-centric applications, but the company pivoted towards industrial and commercial opportunities shortly after I joined.
Developing a rapid method for prototyping interactions was important to iterate on interactions ideas without overburdening engineering resources. I developed a system of capturing hand gestures and synchronizing UI animations to them to create short interaction vignettes. These in-turn could be presented to stakeholders to clearly show interactions being proposed. When an idea felt good to the team, developers could then take the vignettes and implement on the software platform. It was scrappy, yet very effective in practice.
Once implemented into a testable state on the wearable, I would work closely with the engineers to expose tuning variables for the UI that would allow me to fine-tune the responsiveness and behavior of the interactions on the device itself. In-house testing of the interactions, combined with ad-hoc field testing drove further improvements interactions. The leadership was supportive of this design process and allowed me to bring on two additional design resources to increase the velocity of ideation, prototyping, and iteration.
Being able to use standard Android OS interactions was key, as product management beleived it would ease in the adoption and porting of existing commercial applications to the Atheer platform. Selection, going back, scrolling, swiping, and so on all had to have an air gesture equivalent. Through the prototyping, iteration, and testing, the team started to lock down on certain core gestures and interactions combined with finger "poses". These formed the basis of the interaction design pattern library.
