Accelerate
An award-winning augmented reality training application built with Accenture and The CDM
Role
Agile Product Owner
UX/UI Designer
Team
Alyzah Kaharian, Amy Li, Charity Principe, Rex Shi, So Jeong Bae
Our challenge
How can we make collision estimator training more consistent, engaging and scaleable?
Project kick-off with Accenture senior management
Project Background
As part of the Masters of Digital Media program at The CDM, our team had the tremendous fortune of working with Accenture, an innovative global management consulting firm. Our initial brief asked us to explore how XR (virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality) could be used to facilitate learning.
What's your problem?
Our clients didn’t approach us with a burning problem that needed solving. With the objective to "explore XR technology", we were in some sense asked to explore a solution before we had a problem. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with this approach, there’s definite value in research and exploration, but from our perspective as advocates of human-centered design our brief at times felt anathema to the way things are “supposed to be done”. Were we putting the cart before the horse, in exploring the solution before the problem? We definitely didn’t want to make something for sheer novelty without a valid use-case, but also had to respect that we’d been asked to explore a potential solution. Given that our clients were open in terms of the specific extended reality medium we would pursue, this meant that we weren’t necessarily required to produce VR for example. In fact, our clients were incredibly gracious and supportive in allowing us to employ design thinking to identify potential problems, and how XR tech might address those issues.
Running a condensed GV Design Sprint
Our approach
Our first challenge and opportunity was in deciphering our brief. Our clients weren’t particularly prescriptive, and showed a lot of faith in us and in the design-thinking process, but at the same time when things are too wide open it can be hard to know what direction to go in. As much as constraints can be challenging, they’re absolutely necessary in guiding the design process. After several meetings with our third-party client, we gained an understanding of some of the circumstances surrounding their current training regimes, and identified collision estimator training as our general problem space. By identifying this space we could now dig deeper to get a better understanding of how estimators were being trained and to surface any pain points that XR technology might be able to address.
Design criteria
GOOD AR USE CASE
We were not interested in developing something purely for novelties sake. It was we imperative that we identify a solid use-case for the XR technology. We frequently asked our selves, “is this something that could be better solved by a poster, video, website?” Does XR actually solve a problem.
HIGH DELIVERABLE FIDELITY
Accenture is a respected global organization, and as much as they understand the design process and can look past the fidelity of a prototype or MVP, the intention was to demo this project to clients, so it had to have professional level of fidelity.
FEASIBLE TO IMPLEMENT
While this project was exploratory in capacity, we did not want to create solution that would be impossible to implement
USER RESEARCH VALIDATED
It was important for us to work with who would be the end-users of this product
Our solution
An immersive virtual hands-on training simulation for the next generation of estimators
Trace the steps of an estimator
Follow guidance to get into the right position to capture your photo
Location Tracking
Guidance through the virtual world
Course platform
The augmented-reality portion of the application is situated within a larger self-guided training platform, photo training tool would be one of many course modules
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