Prototyping for Google Glass
My experience using Justinmind Prototyper Pro
I participated in the Connected Traveler Hackathon hosted by American Airlines and Wearable World last weekend. The event was filled with lots of great ideas and wearables-enthusiasts. It was exciting to see the many possibilities of how cool new wearables and iBeacon technology are going to transform our travel experiences.
My team’s idea was: A Google Glass app that keeps a frequent traveler abreast with next steps and key information at the airport based on proximity data. Contextual information is updated and shown to the traveler via cards before, during and after the flight using iBeacons and APIs. Wearables are the perfect devices to implement this idea because they provide information quickly when needed so frequent travelers can have a worry-free airport experience. In addition, we wanted to make it easier for family members, or someone picking up the traveler on arrival, to stay informed about the travelers whereabouts through automatic text messages sent out at certain points during the journey.
Because our team’s app required a lot of connected pieces, such as incorporating many cool APIs to bring in different contextual information, we started out by first looking for a prototyping tool for Google Glass.
Based on the Google Glass design guide and our team’s conceptual model, I created prototypes using Adobe Illustrator. I used them to communicate the design ideas to my team, but as a next step, I needed to actually send the prototypes over to Google Glass to demonstrate in our final presentation.
So I looked into Justinmind Prototyper. Justinmind is the company which creates prototyping tools for web, mobile and even Google Glass. They were a partner at the hackathon. Also, when I Googled for a Glass prototyping tool, Justinmind came up as the first link. So I signed up for a 30-day free trial of their Pro Edition.
One of the great things about the Justinmind Prototyper was that it comes with many Google Glass Templates so a user can create designs for Google Glass even without knowledge of other design tools like Illustrator.
However, I faced some usability issues along the way. As a result, at the end our team could not load the prototypes on Google Glass. Here are some of the usability issues I faced.
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Issue 1: Handy widgets, but not yet user friendly to consume
Downloading the Prototyper was a breeze. But I ran into some minor bumps along the way.
It wasn’t immediately obvious that I needed to first create a new canvas with a 640 X 340px screen size. Navigating to the ‘Widget libraries’ page to access the Google Glass widget wasn’t straightforward, nor was understanding how to use the library. And the menu icons on the ‘My Widgets’ tab aren’t intuitive.
Another usability issue was that I did not think I needed to first download my choice of widget from the Justinmind website to my computer, then import it back to the Prototyper. It would have been nice if the widgets were pre-loaded or it was a one step process to import one.
Justinmind is a promising tool but the User Experience needs some work and usability testing would help reveal a lot of these issues.
Issue 2: Need for better way of show interactive prototypes
To display a static screen design on your Glass is pretty easy. Basically you send an email to yourself and open that up in Glass to display the image. However, there isn’t yet a good solution for showing interactive flows. As an alternative, the Prototyper lets you create ‘a video’ (a timed slide show) to demo to your audience. There are two problems associated with this. First, it isn’t intuitive how the various screens can be transformed into a video and instructions are lacking. Second, this approach makes it hard to coordinate a presentation with a demo video. It would be useful to have a way to load an interactive prototype onto Glass.
After my Hackathon presentation, I ran into Xavier Renom Portet, the CEO of Justinmind who told us that a new version of the Prototyper is on its way. It would be bringing a lot of usability improvements. I am certainly looking forward to trying it out.
Bottom line
Justinmind Prototyping tool was a great way to Prototype for Glass and allowed us to present it to our judges by projecting my computer screen. What would be more powerful is that the Prototyper gives a user more control of interactive prototypes once loaded to Google Glass.
My experience prototyping Google Glass screens taught me that it is fun to design a new user experience using wearables, but also challenging because of the constrain of limited screen real estate.
