Designing for an AR experience

Introduction

A quick thinking project

I wanted to look at designing for an AR experience, and with the huge changes in technology and the addition of the iPhone with the LIDAR sensor I thought the opportunities for this kind of user experience are getting greater. Throughout I will be asking questions like how will a user interact? Are elements fixed or are they interactable? how would it deal with a lot of information? And many other questions like this.

I will be looking at the primary screen of the product, just to keep the scope narrow and allow for some key exploration into the AR features.

Topic

I decided to set myself a quick task on creating an AR experience for a car rental application to keep track of your car details and/or issues. Now this app could be built out more but I’m going to focus on one key area and a small feature set for this article.

Problem

I want to quickly check my car’s health while on a road trip, I wanted to create an AR experience which makes it easy to check you rental, report damage, and keep up date with key statistics.

Approach

Key Features

The feature set I am focusing on is the AR functionality, which would enable a user to complete the most common tasks when renting a car, this is checking on car details, and submitting damage reports.

Product Structure

In order to figure out where the flow I would be experimenting with would sit within the architecture I create a product structure to allow me to map out the experience and what functionality would need to be given to a user on the AR flow.

Low fidelity wireframe tests

Solution

Learnings

• Designing for AR has different limitations, especially thinking around edge cases such as what if the user can’t get nearer, or walk around the other side. In this case content should be accessible manually too, to be able to toggle through details.
• Content overload is very common, so trying to degrease cognitive load by reducing the amount of content given at once is key.
• There are so many features the application could use so I had to limit for 1 flow, but designing a flow for finding your car would be really useful.