How We Began Experimenting with Augmented Reality

Several of us in the office have been excited about augmented reality for some time, but it was only after the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) earlier in 2018 that I was inspired to begin rapid prototyping and tinkering with AR formally. Our goal was simple enough: build a demo in a single working day that would solve a problem.

One day might sound daunting, but for us moving and iterating fast is part of our DNA. What problem would we aim to solve? Well, with our office on Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago, we frequent a convenience store right down the street. It’s a favorite pit stop on the way into office, during lunch, or between meetings, so we set out to create a demo that offers augmented reality as a personal way-finding guide.

Our Rapid Prototyping Process

Our process was meant to be quick and dirty—a truly rapid prototype. We began by taking our problem and solution to a notebook. A notebook allows us to capture hand-drawn user experience flows and rough interface elements quickly. Even in the digital age, doodling by hand is the most efficient way to brainstorm what user experiences might look like for something new (especially on a time crunch).

Taking our hand-drawn sketches and holding them up allowed us to make sure they were intuitive and fit into reality. After nailing down our direction, we took a few photos of our local convenience store and moved our sketches and those photos onto the computer in Sketch, our preferred digital design tool.

Keeping in mind best practices for an easy to use, accessible user interface, we adapted our designs to not only fit the environment in our example photos, but also fit an environment that would always be changing. Now that we had digitized designs and a prototype, we made another trip back to the store to test them.

We walked around the store with the prototype on our phone. At the same time, we recorded video from our phone’s perspective so that we could digitally layer our prototype over the video when we got back to the office. We would make this trip three times, all incognito, to finalize our prototype.

The Result

Our prototype in action.

Given the short turnaround on this app, we’re really pleased with how it turned out. Imagine being guided to the product you’re seeking out in an unfamiliar convenience store via augmented reality. Is this in the roadmap of mobile apps for stores like Target, 7/11, and fashion brands? Will this be a component of the new Amazon Go store in Chicago? We don’t know which AR applications will become mainstream in the coming years, but we do know that several will, and we’re already excited to work on AR projects with our clients.

What We Learned

Research and development isn’t something new to us Punchkickers. We used to have a team solely dedicated to R&D, Punchkick Labs, but now we bake those goals and propensity to tinker directly into every team throughout the company. Utilizing our R&D experience, we eliminated documentation during this experiment and worked as fast as possible to build an AR prototype and learn from the process.

One of our biggest learnings came in confidence. Designing for an uncontrollable experience like augmented reality seemed daunting, but it wasn’t. In a static user interface, we determine what the background looks like and how UI elements will sit on top of it. In AR, the background could be anything: light, dark, cluttered.

The demo helped reinforce the concept of simplicity and need for easily digestible information, similar to road signage on the highway but digitally inside a store. Keeping information even simpler and more visual than in traditional UX and UI is the key to creating successful AR, as it allows for greater background deviation while maintaining usability.

Need an augmented reality experience for your app? Get in touch.