Vuforia Studio

Studio had been in a state of iteration for a decade, and it had grown in different (and not always complementary) directions based on individual customer needs. When I came on, I wanted to get a full accounting of what this massive application could do.

Splitting up the work, my design team and I conducted an audit of all the text appearing in the app (from control titles, to tooltips, to instructions and errors), controls, (titles, affordances, and iconography), functionality and layout.

We then wiped the software from our systems in order to evaluate the onboarding process for a new user. I compiled and presented the full audit report at the first quarterly planning workshop conducted since I had joined the team, and was able to offer compelling arguments for many UX improvements that had flown under the radar for years.

Back in 2022, the Studio team would have told you that they didn’t really need design outside of a small department to make some buttons and pop-ups for them on occasion. It was a highly engineering-led operation. This made sense, as it was a tool made by AR programmers looking to simplify some complexity for other developers.

Beside that, the main directive from on high was to satisfy the customer who bought the software with business outcomes, the actual user’s satisfaction with the tool was secondary or worse. I strove to change that ideology while still incorporating the customer focus, and even pushing that further with features that would satisfy both camps.

To begin this transition I took years of backlogged features and data and started associating them into broader concepts, which could be presented graphically and with other visual aids. Once everything was laid out in an easy-to-follow set of charts, we could begin finding areas of high value and low or shared-effort, and our feature planning became rapidly more holistic.

The designers who had been on the team before were pretty frustrated by the time I came on. It became quickly apparent that it was really difficult to get any changes made to the product, and that often their designs would have been hacked to bits by the time they were released, leaving users with a broken and difficult to use feature, where the initial design was elegant.

I saw this as my first duty as a product design manager, and set to work breaking down these barriers, setting up individual, rotating feature-teams, and sold the change in structure by enlisting the support of the PM and PO teams, with a promise of more visibility on feature progress and better user-satisfaction.

My biggest undertaking on the Studio team is occurring right now. The extended team on this product has years and years of experience with all of our products, and I am working with the engineers and PMs to build bridges and definitive flows between these products. That’s about all I can say for now.