North* case study

Interaction Designer

*Acquired by Google

My role

At North, I had the incredible opportunity to design for a new form factor. Information has to be useful, relevant and easily digestible with a small display. The glasses require new understanding of how this product will be used. The discrete nature requires a new way of thinking about design solutions. How does a user interact with a text message in their eye when on the bus? At a family gathering? In a meeting? What can glasses offer in solving a need that user’s didn’t know was a problem? These are the kinds of exciting challenges I faced of every day.

image-asset.png

My general process

1. PM and UX planning

  • Work with PM to prioritize UX tasks in the product

  • Assign tasks each sprint and check-in weekly

2. Sprint-focused planning

  • Worked in 2 week sprints

  • UX had full ownership over each project

3. Interaction solution

  • Focused on the interaction of a given feature

  • Created wireframes, user journeys, IA diagrams etc. to communicate

  • Synced with PM and design to iterate

4. Design and product reviews

  • Had a weekly UX/PM review to go over work in progress

  • Take feedback from that meeting and iterate further after having more eyes on the interaction spec

5. Refine and visual hand-off

  • Iterate, review, iterate, review

  • Work with visual design to make the interaction more beautiful

  • Hand off specs to development using Zeplin

Project showcase: Screenshot share

Please note: some information is omitted to protect company privacy.

How do we help non-Focals users see what Focals' users are experiencing? How can we enhance the user’s experience through sharing?

Project definition and exploration

I worked with Project Managers on the concept of giving users the ability to share their experience with Focals. The form factor can make it difficult for others to understand what “a display only you can see” does. To achieve that, I did the following:

  1. Created simple user stories

  2. Outlined requirements with PMs

  3. Analysed our current bug-fixing “screenshot” experience to see how we could make it customer facing

  4. Ask current beta users what they liked and didn’t like about the feature

 

current-experience.png
example-min.png
 

Multiple solution investigation

I took what we had and then made a few interaction models to help better understand how we could use this functionality in a more useful customer-facing way. I came up with 3 possible ways of approaching the customer need:

  1. Screenshot capability with the ability to add a photo

  2. Taking a photo with the ability to add a screenshot to it

  3. Simultaneously taking a photo and screenshot at the same time

These 3 options needed more digging into, so I made some very simple wireframes with example images, printed them out and did some paper prototype guerrilla testing around the office with 10 people. With the results, I was able to go into direction #3 more clearly.

Doc+Mar+01+2019-min.png
Doc+Mar+01+2019(1)-min.png
2-step_flow-min.png
ex-min.png

Design iteration, visuals and hand off

After defining the correct user flow, I did the following:

  1. Reviewed with UX, PMs, Enginering and Leadership

  2. Worked with talented visual designer (Rachel Kreutzkamp) to create the visuals for hand-off to engineering.

  3. Worked alongside Engineering to prioritize pieces of Screenshot Share and check-in on the progress.

04_UXT-363-landscape-capture-darker-branded-min.png

Other projects

Due to confidentiality within my work, I cannot post details of my projects. If you want to learn more about my work, send me an email (daviswanless@gmail.com)

However, below I have outlined some of the subject areas of the projects I have had the opportunity to participate in.

  1. Information architecture companion app restructuring

  2. Complete system usability testing

  3. Sharing from your glasses experience

+ many more