2021
UX Research
UI/UX Design
Interviewing
Synthesis
Prototyping
Miro
Figma
Blender
Useberry
The Fab Lab (Fabrication Laboratories) Siegen acts as a multidisciplinary hub for creative and collaborative activities. The lab gives its visitors access to many pieces of equipment for object fabrication, namely 3D printers, collaborative robot arm, cutting plotter, and many others.
As part of my Master’s degree program in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at the University of Siegen, I was assigned a project titled “Designing an Augmented Reality-based guided tour for the Fab Lab Siegen based on Literature about Guided Tours and Interviews”.
The first phase of this project consists of contextual inquiries and generative interviews.
An initial interview was conducted with the project lead to understand more about the context behind this idea.
Safety measures as entry barrier to newbies
Every person who wants to visit the lab and use the equipments have to go through asafety training, which is more or less a guided tour with emphasis on do’s & don’ts with the machines. Since the safety training is only conducted twice a month, the people who want to visit have to wait long
Casual visitors are hindered
There are casual visitors who have no prior experience with any equipments and just want to look around to see what activities are available. They are no exception to the lab’s safety training policy. Because of that, they are hindered from visiting the lab
COVID-19 measurement
Due to strict regulations during the pandemic, the Fab Lab team can no longer welcome every new visitor and provide them with the necessary introduction like before
Due to the reasons above, an AR-guided tour was deemed to be the right solution for casual visitors who only want to look around and not use the equipment. They don't have to complete the safety training in order to have an AR-guided tour.
The contextual inquiry method was carried out twice with 2 members ofthe Fab Lab team to learn about visitor-staff interaction, uncover the current process of tour-giving in the Fab Lab, identify the needs and pain points from the Fab Lab team, and identify what motivates the activities in Fab Lab. I did a role-play as a first-time visitor to make the experience as authentic as possible.
Heterogeneity & Diversity
Fab Lab Siegen was not only open for students of the University of Siegen. It reached a lot of facets of the society in & around the Siegen-Wittgenstein district: students, pupils, makers, companies, lecturers, refugees, and many more. This meant that the design decisions that would be made need to be inclusive for all of those groups.
Community work is the backbone of Fab Lab
People contribute their knowledge and support each other's projects. Even during the times that the lab is closed, there are still virtual lab sessions where people share what they have been working on and support each other. It is a safe space for anyone who has an interest in technology, even the first touchpoint tos park interest.
3D printers
In terms of machine and technology, the 3D printers are the highlight of the lab, especially the Prusa ones.
Demo shelf
When the lab was still in the previous building which was located on the main street, the demo shelf attracted a lot of attention. People occasionally stopped by to look at the items that were created by Fab Lab members. They asked questions to the staff, and thus became interested in fabrication activities. This meant that showcasing the results of those fabrication activities is importantt o spark curiosity and interest from people
Pain Points
Pain points: technical problem in 3D printing machines caused by low-quality materials. Since the visitors are required to bring their own filaments, some of them brought materials that are affordable but not necessarily good quality. Because of this, the printers had troubles often and the Fab Lab team members had to frequently do maintenance to the printers.
Understaffed
At the beginning of this project, the Fab Lab is running on low number of staff.
The generative interviews were conducted with 4 participants who fit the following criteria: those who in the last 6 months have been in the Fab Lab and/or have expressed interest to visit the Fab Lab, and have different fabrication activity experiences & motivations.
The purpose of these interviewes was understand the motivation and goals of the visitors prior to the visit to Fab Lab, to identify what motivates their interest in fabrication activities, and to gauge their pain points & concerns surrounding the topic of items fabrication.
The results of these interviews are synthesized into a user persona under phase 2: Define.
After conducting methods to understand more of Fab Lab staff & visitors' needs, I started defining the problems that need to be solved with the design of an AR-guided tour.
The result of the generative interviews are summarized under the user persona.
These design principles were derived from the interview insights. It should guide the ideation and solutioning process.
Focused on first-timers
Some participants that were interviewed did not have a technical background in fabrication activities but were very eager to learn new things given the right environment and support. On top of that, existing visitors probably would not benefit much from a tour since they already know most of the information anyway. Therefore, the whole experience has to focus on any experience and pain points that a first-timer might have.
Flexibility
The design should aim for flexibility because every visitor has their own end goal in mind. Some first-time visitors have zero experience with fabrication activities and therefore would like to explore all facets of the lab. Some already have their eyes set on the technology they would like to use.
Community
Social interaction was seen as a recurring theme in the interviews. The participants find support and inspiration regarding the topic of 3D printing through a community, either online or in-person. Moreover, all of of them mentioned that some of what they create would be given to their closest friends or family. Therefore, the community side of Fab Lab should be emphasized. Visitors should be encouraged to contribute their knowledge and ask for support. Not only will they get support down the road, but they will also be more likely to stay as frequent visitors after joining the community.
As the next step, high-level user stories were written down to define solutions in the context of the visitors and the benefits that they will receive. User stories were chosen because it helps everyone arrive at shared understanding much faster than reading a requirement document. These user stories also served as a guide while ideating the solution. When the solution already has an answer for every user story, that means that it should be ready for the evaluation phase.
As a first-time visitor of the Fab lab, I would like to...
find out what Fab Lab is about so that I know whether Fab Lab fits in my interests.
find out what machines Fab Lab is offering and its specifications so that I know about the fabrication activities I can do in there.
see the sample works of others so that I can get inspired.
know who other visitors of the Fab Lab are so that I can seek out connections and support from others with related projects.
ask questions related to Fab Lab so that the purpose of my visit can be fulfilled.
find out how to get started with a project and the prerequisites so that Ican start my project smoothly.
find out resources related to my project so that I can be better prepared for my next visit to the Fab Lab.
The ideating process consists of augmented agent ideation, user flow, a storyboard and a wireframe.
As the name of the project suggests, it was imperative to have a virtual agent that can guide visitors and answer the questions through a chatbot. Therefore, it was necessary to choose a visual representation of the agent. Existing scientific literatures were used as a guiding principle.
According to the taxonomy of mixed reality agents (Holz etal., 2011) the agent can be categorized into a virtual agent since it occupies the virtual reality. Wooldridge and Jennings (1994) suggested that an agent should be “autonomous, possesses a social ability, reactive and proactive”.
Additionally, anthropomorphism is also chosen to display the virtual agent since the visitors can treat the agent like people (Kim et al., 2017) and thereby develop empathy (Chan, 2012) and trust (Krueger et al., 2017).
Autonomy
Fabby embodies autonomy since it would be able to operate autonomously without the visitor having to control it.
Social ability
Fabby should be able to engage with the visitors through dialogues.
Reactive
It can perceive and navigate around the Fab Lab environment, making turns anda voiding collision with walls as necessary.
Proactive
It can take initiative to show the visitors around and have its own end goal in mind.
Anthropomorphized
Pain points: technical problem in 3D printing machines caused by low-quality materials. Since the visitors are required to bring their own filaments, some of them brought materials that are affordable but not necessarily good quality. Because of this, the printers had troubles often and the Fab Lab team members had to frequently do maintenance to the printers.
For the first version of the guided tour, the primary user flow should be the process of guiding users to go through the point-of-interests (POIs) inside the Fab Lab, which includes equipments, machines, and demo installations. The visitors can stop at each of the POI to read more information or watch a video.
Safety regulations will be explained for each POI. For every machine, there is a 'Hall of Fame' which showcases artwork/prototype made using that machine. Visitors can either download the 3D model (for 3D printing results) and comment.
Towards the end, there is an augmented visitor guide board that they can fill out. THey can also read what previous visitors has written.
Storyboard and wireframing ideations are combined into one.
The prototype that would get validated with the users.
On the video below, you can see the end-to-end interaction with the prototype.
The prototype was tested to the same participants in first generative interview by showing them a video concept. This method was picked because an in-person usability testing was not possible since this project took place during the lockdown period.
A questionnaire was also created to gather quantitative feedback and to reach more people amidst the time constraint.
The video that was used during the concept testing.
Results from the concept testing.
Some tweaks that were added to the prototype after the concept test.
Displaying augmented information on the machine
From the feedback of the users, I've learned that they were expecting the augmented reality as a medium to explain each part of machines. So I've added some augmented information to the most popular machine, the Prusa 3D printer. To make the experience more accessible, Fabby the virtual agent should also be speaking out loud the written content.
Providing text chatbot on top of voice chatbot
Another feedback was that the virtual agent needs to also facillitate text communication on top of voice interaction.
When I was given this project in the middle of a lockdown, I knew that it wasn’t going to be an optimal end-to-end design process. Especially since there was no developer that I would work together with. Therefore, this project was more of a fun one to hone my visual design skills. However, there are still things to learn from:
There are always going to be suboptimal projects. Thus, we have to work within the constraints and find creative solutions to our problem. In this project, concept testing using a video was my way to solve the problem of testing an AR mobile application design.
However, it was definitely wasn’t enough to find out how usable the AR guided tour is within the lab environment. What would happen when there are several people in the rooms at the same time? How would this influence visitors’ self-awareness, when one visitor mentioned that speaking the question out loud might risk her being overheard and made her feel less competent?
Despite there being a lot of homework to be done to make this a perfect study, this prototype could serve as a minimum viable product to better understand the Fab Lab’s visitors needs through early testing. After all, the perfect is the enemy of good and barrier to done.
