Illuminacasestudy

Problem

User 1: Illumina customer support team

The customer have to ask a long list of information from the customers
There are multiple resources to find more about the errors but no one stop
Long turnaround times for solving trivial issues
Increased customer frustration due to long waiting hours
Increased customer frustration due to long waiting hours

User 2: Illumina instrument developer team

No easy way to add/edit/update error details on instruments
Each developer required to make code changes to respective instrument
No simultaneous creation and deployment of errors
Dependence on instrument software update to update error messages

Reflections

Making an impact
I was fortunate to contribute my skills and expertise in a vision that is here to make a difference inhumankind through the power of genome. I believe as designers we can contribute to the revolution of genomics and healthcare by creating interfaces than can support and accelerate the research of others in the field.
The error lookup tool that I worked on would help researchers seamlessly trouble shoot any errors on their instruments while they continue to innovate.
Cross-team collaborations
I worked with instruments developers and a team of customer support which held PhDs in bio-genomics. It was a wonderful and fulfilling experience to do such cross-domain collaborations which definitely expanded my knowledge horizons. Did you know Illumina's Illumina COVIDSeq Test could output ~3000 tests on 12 hours?
Value in user centered design and user satisfaction
I learned that the value of any product lies in its design how that design keeps the customer engaged and happy. Building the error trouble shooting tool made me realize that it was helping not only the customers save their time but also helping the whole pipeline - instrument developers, deployers, customer support team and the associated loyal customers

Team and Role

My role

Designer
Developer

Team

Toshi Gupta
Ruchita Lodha

Duration

8 Weeks
Mar'20-May'20

Tools

Unity
Vuforia
ARCore
Figma

Motivation

Dyslexia is a language based learning disorder which is found in 1 in 5 students and kids who have difficulty often avoid reading because it's stressful.
We wanted to use an immersive technology like AR/VR/MR for good together with digital game based learning to enhance the learning experience and help students retain things in a less stressful and playful way.

Why Augmented Reality?

We did a qualitative research on ways and methods adopted to help dyslexic kids learn faster like the Orton Gillingham method and the Wilson Method. We studied the online videos available for teachers to pick out the key components that are very important while helping in dyslexia.
We realized thats supporting these methods with augmented reality for multi-sensory learning (Kinesthetics, Visual, Tactile, Phonetics) coupled with game based learning would help students get accurate and faster in alphabet identification

User Journey Mapping

Potential users: Kids who find it difficult to read, learn and identify alphabets.
The idea is to build an application that augments the alphabet cards/alphabet book with 3D holograms and support the phonetic learning through sound assistance. It will have 3 main features:
1. Learning about the shape and usage of alphabet
2. Identification of alphabets after learning through games
3. Learning to draw the alphabets through guidance

Lo-Fi Sketches

Introducing JoJo - the voice assistant

‍To help the students engage and navigate better with the learning and games, we introduced a cute animated hippo!

The main reasons behind having a voice assistant are:
1. Help students navigate between different parts of the application
2.Lower the burden of reading instructions for dyslexic kids
3.Give a comfortable learning experience through their "Friend- JoJo"

Technology decisions

1. The application is developed in Unity and tested on an android and iOS mobile device
2. To enable enhancements on a book/alphabet card, we decided to go for a marker-based approach in Vuforia

*This project was carried out during COVID-19 and therefore our plan of enabling the application on Hololens could not go through.

High Fidelity prototype and interactions

2D menu and instructions: The game starts with a 2D menu with an introduction by a friendly assistant JoJo. JoJo guides the user to the different sections of the application like Learn, Play and draw.
You can listen to JOJO's instructions in the final video attached.

Dragging/dropping and success/failure animations: To test students' capability to identify the learned alphabet, they are asked to drag and drop the associated 3D hologram into the ring options. Based on the answer the application reacts gently with animations of right and wrong answer.

Shooting with a ball: For letter identification, the application is supported with physics enabled bowling game. The students' are asked to shoot the associated hologram to the right letter glasses.
The right and wrong answer are distinguished with sounds.

Drawing: The students can reference the drawing technique animation and try drawing with a physical marker.

Final video

Reflection and learnings