ORII - Making a voice-based wearable intuitive

Overview

Background

A product with 2,082 backers, getting ready to ship to beta testers

Objective

The hardware product is ready, but the learning curve is high

My focus was to figure out and implement a plan to shorten and simplify the learning curve.

How do we teach and help users use this novel product in an easy way?

Responsibilities

The first UI/UX designer hired

Results

A simplified onboarding process, a user friendly companion app

Research

Understanding where users need help

Initial research was conducted to see how potential users and backers perceived the current onboarding process to identify the most frustrating and most exciting parts of the journey.

Insights

Users are excited about bone conduction, overwhelmed with customization, and don’t know where to start

After initial research, we found that most users find the ring’s bone conduction feature to be most interesting, but since it is such a novel product, they often have a lot of clarifying questions and do not know how to proceed.

Solution

Minimize potential frustrations, maximize excitement

1. Guide the onboarding process

Added more checkpoints (👉) throughout the onboarding journey, introduced information redundancy, eliminated unnecessary information(❌), and increase interactiveness to minimize confusion and keep it exciting.

2. Interactive tutorial - add excitement to learning

Upon downloading the companion app, users will get access to an interactive tutorial to learn how to use the product. It’s designed to leverage the excitement from using a novel product to soften its learning curve. Here, the user gets to try the product as they learn how to use it.

3. The right information at the right time

Instead of teaching the user all of the ring’s functions in one go, key information is delivered at different checkpoints according to user need.

4. Companion app - the last mile

The companion app is used for customizing notifications, adjusting read speed, OTA updates, and quick access to tutorials.

👉 Final user journey - a faster and more intuitive process

After an iterative process of designing the user journey and testing it, the updated onboarding flow took 10 mins less than the original process.

Key Designs

Tutorial in the app

🕵🏻‍♂️ Visual guidance - introducing a little bit of fun

When Origami Labs initially surveyed their backers, the fourth most popular reason to why they decided to back this product was because it made them feel like a spy. So in the spirit of introducing a little easter egg, and of making the tutorial more fun, I imbdued a subtle, James Bond style theme throughout. The rest of the app follows the ORII design guide set before.

Iterations

10 usability tests were conducted for the tutorial and the whole unboxing process. The key takeaway from these iterations were to keep it simple and share one piece of information one at a time.

Companion app

Being a companion app for a device designed to reduce screen time, I designed the companion app to be as simple and minimally intrusive as possible, whilst maintaining the customization features that the ring has. The companion app also underwent 10 individual usability tests.

I used a circle in a 4 corner graphic to represent the LED color and number of vibrations assigned to that notification. Although it is unique, this is to balance maintaining minimalism whilst providing ample information at a glance. Users often click the information icon and are able to understand the visual immediately after. Since ORII has a high learning curve and thus a longer tutorial, I made sure to embed all the instructions into the companion app to minimize confusion and allow the user to experiment instead of making them go through another tutorial. The final iteration underwent 15 usability tests, in which 14/15 users went through the onboarding process and app with ease.

User quotes

Takeaways