Undersea
UI/UX Designer & User Researcher (2019)
Undersea is an environmental underwater experience published on the Magic Leap One headset. This project was based in Unreal and completed in July of 2019. During this project, I assisted the lead designer in creating new icons for the menu system and designing the onboarding for the experience. During the production phase of the project, I was also responsible for running multiple rounds of user testing (surveys and cognitive walkthroughs) in order to gather more data on how end-users wanted to interact with spatial computing content.
USER RESEARCH
Menus and Experience
When I was brought onto this project, a good amount of production was already underway. The core team had already put together a prototype and were working towards a known deliverable. Working with the Lead Designer on this project, I was tasked with handling the majority of the user testing, collaborating on iconography, and then designing out the full range of onboarding for the experience.
Below, you can see the results from some of the user tests I ran. During the last half of the project I coordinate and ran tests from basic icongraphy surveys to full-experience cognitive walkthroughs. I esclated my findings as necessary to the project managers and key stakeholders in the project and we found good ways to integrate said testing inside of the project workflow.
VISUAL DESIGN
Onboarding and Iconography
Because of the testing I had done within the main menu and the MVP prototype, and the escalation of certain tasks, I was given the challenge of working on finalized assets with the Lead Designer, Javier Busto. These tasks were forcused around updating iconography within the very simplistic form set (minimal, blockish, white) for pieces of content that really didn't have a standard in games or spatial computing (credits or meshing). I was also given the opportunity of curating the beginning of the experience with a fellow technical artist, Jonathan Small.
The technical artist and I collaborated together on this project to figure out what would fit within the theming of the project, and what would be appropriate for the meshing and reticle process. During this time we worked a lot with this idea of floating light particles as bioluminescent plankton that you often see in coastal ocean waters at night.
Working with the lead designer, we iterated on the onboarding for the experience. I learned a lot about the process of a meshing system and how to escalate to end-users. Specifically the meshing and reticle process was the most difficult as it involved designing motion concept for which a reticle (attached to users headpose) finds a waypoint (within the roomspace), approaches it, locks onto it, process the information, and then impacts unto the newly formed mesh that is also visualized.
Because of the collaborations I had with Jonathan Small on this project, we were able to ship an experience that had a good foundation and understandable components for non-expert users.
POSTMORTEM
Lessons Learned
Through these escalations from tests and additions to UX Design, this work provided useful information not just to my experience with this project individually but also influenced my future pieces of work.
Because of these tests and designs I was able to determine the following:
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A necessity towards one input system for the onboarding, menu, and experience.
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A distinction towards specific icons as standards, such as star for credits.
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An emphasis on clarity and error prevention.