Making Augmented Reality More Social and Usable

Project Overview: LightUp is an Edtech company based in the Bay Area that focuses on creating augmented reality(AR)-based apps for math and science teachers as a way of engaging students in their classes. For this project, we were tasked to work on their Halo AR mobile app.

Halo AR was initially launched back in November-December of 2020, about 4-5 months before we were assigned to this project. During that time, LightUp accumulated user feedback and determined that the next course of action was to enhance Halo AR by adding new features to the app that they believed would increase user engagement, retention, and growth. But they weren’t quite sure what new features to include, so I was brought in to lead user research initiatives that explored this topic.

Goal (objective): Discovery research to understand users’ experiences with creating content on the Halo AR mobile app in order to identify opportunities for improving the app’s usability in ways that enhance user growth and retention.

Team: As the Lead UX Researcher, I worked with a team of two UX designers and two software engineers.

Duration: April - May 2021

Methods: semi-structured user interviews, stakeholder interview, usability tests, desk research, affinity mapping, user persona, competitive and comparative analyses, prototyping, user observations

Role: 

• Created stakeholder and user interview scripts to ensure that our questions were properly phrased, aligned with research objectives, and ordered in a way where each subsequent question built on the information obtained from previous questions

• Led moderated user interview sessions via Zoom to better understand their challenges with using the Halo AR app 

• Crafted a problem statement based on insights synthesized from user interviews for the purpose of summarizing the main issues users had with Halo and prioritizing the focus of our design solution

• Created a user persona to outline the goals, motivations, needs and pain points of users

• Performed competitive and comparative analyses of AR and social media apps to explore what they were doing well and identify opportunities for improvement

• Conducted daily standups for monitoring team progress and planning the agenda for team sessions

• Evaluated our prototype’s usability by conducting six usability tests with three current users and three non-users in order to support the client’s goals of user growth and retention

Key Insights: 

• Users want the ability to easily edit their Halos (content that users can create using AR).

• Users want to connect and share content with each other.

• Users want to find specific types of content as easily as possible.

End result:

• Added social features that made sharing and discovering content more accessible for users.

• Refined the Halo creation process by adding tooltips that helped new users understand each step of the process as well as editing features that gave users flexibility to customize their Halos before saving them.

• Scaled the user base from 1,000 to over 300,000 across 194 countries

Reflections:

• One thing I would have done differently would be interviewing non-users in addition to existing users in order to support our client’s goal of user growth.

• This project taught me the importance of adapting when setbacks arise and trusting your intuition in those setbacks. This was especially the case during unmoderated usability tests when some of our users were experiencing technical issues. 

• I also gained experience with prioritizing features based on feedback obtained from engineers and clients. As a UX Researcher, my main priority is to advocate for users. But I also had to play the role of product manager by focusing on which features we should include in our designs and which to save for later. 

• Explore different non-Figma methods for prototyping in AR in hopes of overcoming the technical limitations we discovered in Figma.

• Observe how teachers implement Halo AR in their classrooms in order to assess the impact it has on student engagement.