Combining Offline and Online: Usability Principles in AR Projects
Designing a product that is efficient and easy to use — achieving its usability — is real science. Recent trends show that AR technology significantly improves the usability of offline products. Still, there is a challenge of how to make augmented reality itself convenient and easy to use. Here are the principles we have developed after more than 60 AR projects.
Let’s start with the fact that usability applies to lots of fields, still its principles remain the same :) After all, augmented reality belongs to the IT industry. Therefore, the first thing we will talk about is software usability. Here are its key concepts:
- User-friendly interface: The app interaction is not difficult to learn or understand, and requires a minimal explanation for how to use it.
- Efficiency: The user can perform tasks as quickly as possible through the easiest process.
- Memorability: The app interaction is organized so that, even after a long break, a user can immediately remember what and how he has to do.
- Errors: The number of users’ errors is minimized. The global trend is that the user wants to perform tasks in as few actions as possible.
- Satisfaction: The main idea of the app and its implementation evoke positive emotions and satisfaction. This is especially important for the marketing aspect of AR apps, since building a positive emotional connection between the users and the brand is the main task of such apps.
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Besides, several usability characteristics are unique only to AR:
- The technology works on mobile devices.
- Technology is interactive and blends digital and physical worlds together.
Potential Issues When Using AR Apps
- The low-end devices. AR is modern technology, and therefore it has high requirements for the devices to work on. Our products are focused on children’s audience. And not all parents are ready to buy the high-end smartphone for their child. Of course, with the growing market for mobile phones each day, there are fewer and fewer “inefficient” devices. However, there are still users who complain about performance. Unfortunately, this problem can’t be solved.
- This technology is still quite new. Therefore, not all users immediately understand how to use it.
- AR expands the real-world environment by adding digital objects into it and partially immerses the user in the virtual world. It is very exciting and gripping, but it carries risks, especially if we are talking about products for children. Therefore, when developing, it is crucial to remember that a good user is an alive and healthy user.
How to Avoid Potential Challenges with AR
There is nothing we can do about the outdated devices. Still, this is not the case with a user-friendly interface as everything depends on the developer. To simplify the AR app interaction as much as possible and avoid all possible difficulties, we use both our own experience and AR global market trends. We think over every user action step by step, and after the development is complete, we test the app with the target audience for a long time.
To describe the functional consistency of each project, we create a special UI / UX document. It prescribes a step-by-step algorithm for the app, taking into account all possible user actions. One of the main goals of this document is to identify potential problems in the app’s consistency. So that the user does not get confused while using the app, we use visual cues. In-app tips are very helpful. After all, for most users, augmented reality is still a brand new technology, and therefore they do not always guess even about the basic functionality. For example, about the in-app photo or video feature. All it takes is to make a pop-up message “Do you want to take a photo or shoot a video?” and the issue is resolved. Besides, there is one more thing. Children do not usually read tutorials, and it is difficult to explain to them how to perform this or that AR activity. Therefore, sometimes we add a special animated character with a voice acting to the app. He explains how to play as a child’s friend. In this way, we are doing AR that improves usability. I am sure that this approach will soon be widely applied in offline product development. The last thing that is left is the safety matter. Obviously, the responsibility for it lies with the users themselves, and in the case of children products — with their parents. As for us, we do our best so that the user does not forget that he lives in the physical world, which cannot be restarted with the Restart button.
Singing Farm Project
Finally, I will tell you about one of our most challenging AR projects from the usability perspective. The Singing Farm is an exceptional loyalty program for the retail created by Live Animations and Ugears teams. It took 50 specialists (25 from each team) to develop a hundreds-of-thousands-dollars-budget project in six months. The project merges real and digital worlds in one game.
Customers get a self-assembly wooden toy in the opaque packaging at a special price for a certain receipt total. The whole toy set includes a farmer, agricultural equipment, farm animals, and buildings. With the special free mobile app, the user can scan each assembled toy and move it to the Singing Farm mobile game. While working on this project, we understood that, although most potential problems can be detected already at the testing phase, it is important to be prepared for completely unexpected challenges after the release. Labor law prohibits children’s involvement in the production processes, and therefore, even when developing products for children, we have to involve only adults in testing. Although everybody remains a child deep inside, our way of thinking is very different. Therefore, testing actually boils down to finding bugs with the app running on different phone models. As for the “surprises” from the children’s audience, they reveal after the app is released.
In this project, we focused on three key pillars:
- Farm functionality: a mobile game in which you can take care of farm animals, repair equipment and erect buildings, plant and harvest crops, earn virtual currency;
- AR functionality: an animated character of each scanned toy can be placed in its own space, for example, on a table or windowsill;
- Music mixer.
We wanted to create an extremely exciting yet easy-to-use app. There were no issues with the “Farm” module. The technology is still a new experience for many users, and therefore we have designed tutorial and video tips. According to the review statistics, this helped the users a lot in the toy recognition process. Still, we have faced some interesting challenges:
Initially, a supermarket toy could only be scanned once, after this it disappeared from the menu. Everything seemed logical. But the loyalty program is designed in such a way that in the store the child couldn’t guess which toy from the set he would get. Sometimes children got the same toys. And when they were failing to re-scan them, they got upset and wrote to us. We have improved the app within a week. Now each character can be scanned several times. Still, this is a user option and can be set additionally.
We have created a unique music mixer that has no analogs. Its functionality is based on the usability ideas of IT professionals. But it turned out that our target audience sees things differently. Users could not understand why there was a mixer and how to use it. That happened to be an unpleasant surprise for us, as the mixer was one of the main features of the project. We realized that we had created a great but still complex product. We had to redo both the consistency and the visual aspects. We added a tutorial and changed the visualization. Now all the characters’ music tracks are on the screen, which allows the user to easily turn on / off different sounds.
I hope our experience will help you. Summing up, I want to say that usability is actually based on three basic principles: a step-by-step development of the app’s consistency, repeated and thorough app testing, and a willingness to promptly make changes after the product launching.
Best regards
Founder Live Animations Andrey Tymoshenko https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrey-tymoshenko-b572a4b1/
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