LumiNote

Spatial Interface for organization and recall

Role

Product Designer
Unity Developer

Timeline

Aug 2023 - Present

Team

Individual

Context

Augmented reality is reshaping interactions between humans and digital information—connecting us more intuitively with data anchored to real-world spaces. My masters' thesis project explores this promising frontier through development of an Augmented Reality (AR) platform allowing individuals to place custom reminders tied to objects and locations in their physical surroundings.

As a Designer, Researcher, and Developer I’ve crafted the end-to-end experience—ideating, prototyping and testing to distill the needed functions and usability down to core workflows.

Moving beyond surface-level style tweaks, my human-centered process draws deep inspiration from environmental psychology and principles of memory support. The resulting AR interface offers people an unobtrusive yet utterly convenient spatial system for recall assistance woven into daily life.

PROBLEM SPACE

Jumping between calendars, scribbling notes, setting alarms - why do young adults need so many tools just to effectively remind themselves?

Image source: https://medium.com/@jordanedward357/deep-work-how-to-focus-and-concentrate-in-a-distracted-world-ed8a56c89415

Young adults (ages 18-32) leverage a combination of reminder tools such as Notes app, alarms, digital calendars, sticky notes, and productivity tools! But why really?

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Physical reminders such as sticky notes or diaries can be placed in the context where the task needs to be performed, enhancing the likelihood of completion. However, too many physical reminders can become part of the background noise, reducing their effectiveness.

Digital reminders are accessible from virtually anywhere, as long as the person has their device with them but because of this ubiquity, the devices receive a high volume of notifications leading to important reminders being lost amidst less relevant alerts, basically out of sight, out of mind.

Research Question Evolution

How might we employ Augmented Reality to associate location-based reminders for specific daily tasks to optimize recall and workflow?

How can anchoring digital information onto locations in the physical environment create more intuitive organizational systems that align with innate cognitive structures?

How can we utilize Augmented Reality in synergy with established organizational tools to harness the context of physical locations and the accessibility of digital solutions, thus improving recall, streamlining workflow, and bolstering accountability in daily task management?

What benefits do digital spatial interfaces offer in physical environments that enhance task management for young adults?

Benefits of physical context

In leveraging real-world context, the physical domain scaffolds the digital, mirroring and facilitating the innate categorizations encoded in our minds throughout enculturation. This transcends traditional organizational systems.

Cognitive information processing

Essentially, there are three main processes

Ideation
Information Organization
Memory retrieval

Why Augmented Reality?

Effective AR adoption considers the pre-existing affordances of the environment and practicality of implementation. Space context matters - one size does not fit all. Aligning tools to the constraints and opportunities intrinsic to a domain optimizes impact.

Core Features

My Influency streamlines the fragmented process for small businesses to harness the power of localized brand advocates. through a dedicated discovery network, an integrated campaign console, and a contract manager. Business owners can easily track influencer activations, optimize efforts through real-time visibility into content engagement, and handle ongoing partnership administration needs in one place.

Connect with your local influencers

As a business owner activate multi-channel promotions via this diverse local influencer network

One-stop shop to manage your campaign

Real-time influencer tracking reflects your relationship with each influencer: whether your campaign request has been accepted, product has been picked up, or your promised post has been published to the gram. The published content is always available to be viewed at a glance. Finally, a unified analytics dashboard completes the picture, offering actionable macro and micro-level insights into campaign reach and performance over time to inform strategy.

Hassle free negotiations through a secure contract management

Businesses can simply initialize agreements with designated influencers before finalizing compensation. Campaign details such as product information, influencer tracking, and campaign content requirements are pre-populated for context. The flexible templates allow adjustment of deliverable timeframes to match needs on both sides, empowering organic partnerships devoid of friction. Payment visibility and processing is contingent upon influencers satisfactorily publishing endorsements after products are shipped – incredibly simplifying usually complex coordination.

LITERATURE REVIEW

People are good at prioritizing but bad at following through with completing important tasks.

After parsing through 30+ written resources, I realized that...

We need to fully grasp how work instructions are created, how tasks are best delegated, and how workers can expect to increase their throughput in a clear and intuitive way.¹

The problem with task management is not failure to prioritize well. The real challenge is rather making sure that the important tasks get done, even if the unexpected occurs.²

Spatial context plays a leading role in remembering events as it serves as a scaffold for encoding and retrieving episodic memories.³

¹Gedeon, C. (2020, October 7). Moving beyond documents, slides, and spreadsheets. Medium. https://uxdesign.cc/moving-beyond-documents-slides-and-spreadsheets-f4fd2be88539
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²Bellotti, V., & Smith, I. (2000). Informing the design of an information management system with iterative fieldwork. Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques, 227–237. https://doi.org/10.1145/347642.347728
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³Robin, J., Wynn, J., & Moscovitch, M. (2016). The spatial scaffold: The effects of spatial context on memory for events. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42(2), 308–315. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000167

Learnings

People already link tasks to environments naturally with notes, piles, props in purposeful spots.

Work/life has ebbs and flows in time and relationships that impact what/whether tasks gets done.

Priority isn't the problem - it's the effort of ensuring important tasks don't slip through the cracks.

Gaps

Are there contextual hooks common across different users that link certain tasks/info to specific physical spaces?

Can variable moods, energy levels, habits be tracked to cue appropriate reminders?

Is there a way to identify optimal moments and environments to prompt task completion?

Can priority be indicated via common sensory saliency that aligns to an individual’s recall tendencies, for example visual/auditory?

What cues would help recall vital tasks in situations users are prone to forgetting?

EXPLORATORY RESEARCH

A ding 🔊 or a checklist tick ✅: What sparks you into action?

To address these intriguing questions, I developed a two-pronged research approach that employed a combination of surveys and exploratory interviews. The surveys, carefully designed to collect generalized data, focused on sensory preferences related to memory triggers and reminder systems. Complementing this, the exploratory interviews provided a more profound understanding of the various methods people utilize to process information, particularly in critical areas such as ideation, information organization, and memory retrieval.

Initial survey responses shed light on the types of sensory cues highlighting sensory triggers of smells (olfaction), touch (somatosensory), and taste (gustation), are significantly less impactful, with each falling

BROAD REDESIGN GOAL

How can a web interface redesign simplify interactions and information presentation to make marketing more accessible for small businesses?

Simplification through decluttering, intentional visual contrast, strategic white space, and layering by importance provides a path to enhancing understandability. Hence, I aimed to elaborate on the specific elements contributing to clutter from colors, information architecture, visual hierarchy, negative space usage etc. while characterizing the overall impact on the user experience.

THE HUMAN ASPECT

But how do individuals naturally organize information in a spatial context?

Complementing the surveys, the exploratory interviews provided a more profound understanding of the various methods people utilize to process information, particularly in critical areas such as ideation, information organization, and memory retrieval.
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Question Scope

Creative inclinations during ideation.
Preferred methods of information organization for task management.
Sensory cues for memory triggers.
Understanding physical contexts associated to different categories of information.

Time Structured Tina

Age: 24
Occupation: HCI Masters Student
Preferred Organization Tool: Calendar (Organize using Time)

Affinity for calendars

Relies on a digital calendar to organize research deadlines, group meetings, and user testing sessions.

Prefers personalization

Uses calendar integrations with email and project management tools for seamless scheduling.

Visual timelines are beneficial

Prefers visualizing his schedule to allocate time for coursework and independent study.

Reminder creation redundancy

Tina often finds herself jotting down reminders and important points on physical notes during meetings or lectures due to their immediate accessibility. However, this practice leads to redundancy, as she later has to spend additional time transferring these reminders into her digital calendar, increasing the chances of missing critical details or duplicating entries.

Visual Valerie

Age: 26
Occupation: PhD Student in Industrial Design
Preferred Organization Tool: Sticky Notes (Organize using space and proximity)

Sticky notes fiend

Uses a combination of physical sticky notes and digital tools for brainstorming and organizing research ideas.

Visual thinker through and through

Creates visual mind maps to connect concepts in her research.

Reminders belong in her space

Values the tangibility of physical notes for initial idea generation.

Out of sight, out of mind

As she cannot carry her array of sticky notes everywhere, especially when she needs to work in different locations, she often misses out on accessing her reminders when away from her primary workspace.

List driven Leo

Age: 22
Occupation: Computer Science Student
Preferred Organization Tool: Lists or Notes (Organize using hierarchy)

Finding Relevant Partnerships

Uses digital note apps for creating detailed task lists and tracking coding assignments.

Negotiating Fair Compensation

Prefers breaking down complex programming tasks into step-by-step lists.

Managing Multiple Collaborations

Relies on list updates to gauge progress and stay organized

Difficulty Measuring Marketing Impact

He often forgets or overlooks important reminders since they are not prominently visible or immediately apparent amidst his digital lists, leading to missed deadlines or overlooked tasks.

DESIGN IMPLICATIONS AND REQUIREMENTS

Unveiling the Insights: Discoveries and Findings

The research phase culminated in revealing some fascinating and insightful findings:

Redundancy in Reminder Creation

Physical tools are preferred for their immediacy and convenience in initial note-taking but digital tools are more manageable over time.

Design MUST help young adults minimize redundant reminder creation

^{“All my tasks usually originate in some form of sticky note or notebook like jotting, like, for example, if I'm having a meeting, and someone brings up an interesting topic that I'm like, oh, I should research into that further. I'll write it down on a sticky note or within my notebook, to then transfer it eventually to my Outlook.” - P10}

The Advantage of Centralization in Digital Note-Taking

The preference for a centralized repository for notes and reminders emerged as a strong theme among users.

Design MUST make it easy for young adults to recall when the reminder is due and how to access it easily

^{“Rather than having to like go to different places and then suddenly be thrown, oh, here's this nugget of information I prefer to have centralized repository of things such as this wall of sticky notes or the notes on my computer screen.” - P6}

Challenges in Digital Note Retention and Recall

Design must solve the disconnect in digital note-taking by transforming random jots into a structured, memorable system that ensures no thought is ever truly lost.

Design MUST bridge the gap between physical and digital to streamline the reminder and note creation process

^{But with my notes, I feel like it's an actual problem because I randomly jot things down on my phone, and then they're just gone forever because I totally forgot that I jotted something down}

Contextual Proximity and Urgency in Physical Spaces

There is a natural tendency to associate proximity to physical reminders with a sense of urgency. Proximity is directly proportional to urgency

Design SHOULD use proximity as a metric for reminder notification and/or sorting

^{"If I'm placing where there's too much information already, I would probably want to avoid that area because it wouldn't be visible. Also, if I'm placing it somewhere that I know I'm not going to look much then I would forget about it." - P4}

Mitigating information overload

The strategic placement of reminders is crucial – too hidden, and they are forgotten; too cluttered, and they blend into the background noise.

Design SHOULD allow young adults to customize how many reminders are being shown to them

^{If I'm placing where there's too much information already, I would probably want to avoid that area because it wouldn't be visible. Also, if I'm placing it somewhere that I know I'm not going to look much then I would forget about it." - P4}

DESIGN REQUIREMENTS

Translating insights into action

These insights laid the foundation for revising the initial problem question to: "How might we employ Augmented Reality to associate location-based reminders for specific daily tasks to optimize recall and improve workflow?" The design requirements were then established around four critical areas - minimizing reminder redundancy, bridging the gap between physical and digital spaces, using proximity as a metric for reminder notification, and allowing customization of reminder visibility.