Smartwatch app
This project is a collaboration with Samsung R&D Canada. Since 2013, SRCA has been working on cloud technologies related to mobile security, mobile payment, business solutions, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things.
The following case study is the culmination of my work with other designers on the project.
User Research • Interviews • Usability Testing • Prototyping • Video Editing • UI and UX Design.
UX/UI Designer
Samsung R&D aims to equip the new smartwatch with innovative features and to market the product. Therefore, my team was approached to come up with an idea to motivate office workers to wear smartwatches on a daily basis. The initial brief was simple: tap the watch into the TV, and display a file. However, we wanted to focus on making it practical and create an app that would truly increase the productivity of office workers and transform their presentation experience.
My goal in this project was to create a wearable app that allows office workers to easily display presentation slide decks. Office workers need an easy way to navigate powerpoint presentations as the current means (remote clicker, pressing on keyboard) are not reliable. Several office workers have reported that remote clickers tend to stop working or skip slides. On the other hand, the keyboard can be disruptive for the person giving presentations.
We used The Design Sprint methodology for solving problems through designing, prototyping, and testing ideas with users. This quickly aligned us under a shared vision with clearly defined goals and deliverables. The first step was to understand the client’s problem and need, therefore we decided to brainstorm ideas of user problems to help in directing the project.
There is a market potential of Samsung’s wearable devices, specifically in workplaces for businesses and professionals. For that reason, we chose “office workers” as our target users. After doing user research, competitive business analysis, and interviewing office workers, we narrowed down their main frustrations when presenting that we aim to resolve:
1) File transference is complicated.
2) Presentation set up is time-consuming.
3) Current means of switching slides (remote clicker, pressing on keyboard) are not reliable.
One of the UX decisions that we had to make is “how will the users change between slides during presentations?” I came up with the following options and conducted a survey among my peers (5 programmers, 6 designers, 4 project managers) to find out which navigation model is more intuitive:
We created the wireframes following low and mid-fidelity wireframes as a mockup of the watch interfaces to quickly user test. These are early design concepts and we have made major iterations on the design after user testing.
We created a paper prototype to user test and asked testers to imagine they are presenting a powerpoint presentation at the office for the first time and perform some tasks. The tasks included: “view all of your file” “favourite a file” “go to the next slide” “turn on the script option” “turn off tv.”
The second user test adopted the same methodology as User Test 1. The only difference between the two is that this test used the mid fidelity digital prototype, in which all features were implemented on the Samsung watch by the talented programmers. Participants were told to go through several tasks by interacting with the watch.
Samsung design team ran an expert review and provided constructive feedback on the prototype. We’ve made some essential changes to the UX and interface design based on their feedback. Below are some of the changes we have made.
After initial testing with the swiping, I found a secondary micro problem: it wasn’t intuitive to users which direction to swipe. Many users were confused about which direction (left or right) to swipe the watch to change the slides, especially for left-handed users. Swiping in itself was a good solution, but I hadn’t foreseen the problem that each directional swipe can mean something different to different people.
In order to resolve this issue, we added thumbnails of the presentations on the screen instead of an icon. This way, users will recognize the slides that will be presented.
Based on the user test conducted by Samsung R&D, we made further changes to the prototype according to their valuable feedback (in Sketch). Afterwards, I created the final interactive prototype (in Invision).
I created this video using Adobe After Effects.
