AR Design Sprints
Design consulting workshops for rapidly building AR prototypes.
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Challenge
The AR market is in its infancy. Industrial and education organizations are hyped up about the opportunity but they are not sure how to get started. Some companies are jumping in but they are missing key steps such as validating product market fit.
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Approach
We modeled our approach off of Jake Knapp’s Sprint methodology. We tailored it to a 2-3 day workshop and a offline week of prototyping. In the live portion we focused on use case prioritization, AR best practices, and creating low fidelity prototypes. In the offline portion we built working prototypes and engaged in testing engagements.
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Results
We trained and built dozens of AR prototypes with industrial and education customers. We also documented our lessons learned and best practices, and then shared this content with the AR community as well as with internal departments who were focused on developing AR software.
Watch the story.
This MIT talks breaks down the origins, sprint methodologies, and best practices.
Mapping AR’s hype curve
In the early 2010s, AR was raging in the market. Encouraged by popular successes like Pokemon GO and the promise of hardware like Magic Leap, companies sprouted all over the market from education to industrial applications. Today, companies are struggling to find product market fit with some exceptions in the consumer space around entertainment and retail as well industrial use cases like maintenance inspections and training workers in complex, spatially rich operations.
The AR Design Sprint method is a tool to unpack this space and put idea to action with tangible activities focused on building prototypes that can be tested. There is an emphasis on low fidelity prototypes so the investment is managed and testing can be iterative. The ultimate objective to validate product market fit and inform future technical specs in production grade development.
A to Z Guide for AR innovation
Innovators need a roadmap to guide the AR creation process. What we saw in the research and in our own experience working with customers is companies would skip critical strategy and design stages at the cost of testing product market fit. If they jumped right to development, they risked investing costly development resources, time and money, or missing the mark when they go to market.
Sprint book
Jake Knapp’s book on Sprint formed the foundations of our approach. After running many workshops we adapted the model to fit AR uses cases. We discovered a few gaps including the need to teach customers more about AR best practices as well as specific AR prototyping methods such as 3D storyboarding and low fidelity prototypes with no-code prototyping tools like Vuforia Studio.
Defining the Direction
Without best practices on defining use cases, outlining the creation process, and the types of skills and resources required to build AR apps, customer struggle to get started. In the first day of the AR sprint we ran a 3hr crash course that taught these fundamentals.
2. Envisioning the Experience
Since AR is an emerging tech, many product managers, designers, and engineers aren’t familiar with low fidelity prototyping methods. In the first and second day of the Sprint we guided customers through simple UX journey maps that were highlighted for AR potential. Afterward the top candidates were selected and the attendees broke into groups in which they designed AR storyboard.
3. Prototyping the Product
With AR design patterns in mind and proceeding steps that defined the vision and laid out the rough concept, we spent the rest of the sprint detailing out low fidelity prototypes. This often started with simple slide decks where you created an animated experience by clicking through the slides. Following this we would go offline and spend an intensive development week where we would build out AR prototypes in Vuforia or Unity and then provide artifacts for customers to test with their user base.
Artifacts created:
AR Sprint Methodology
AR Use Case Definition Templates
AR Design Patterns
AR Prototyping Toolkit
