Project Challenge
What might collaboration across distances between creatives look like in the next five years?
Project Vision
To make remote collaboration a more organic experience that better supports the natural, creative flows and rhythms two people have when working side-by-side together.
The Concept of Side
Side integrates seamlessly into your daily workflow and environment while diffusing the clunkiness of today’s telecommunications experiences. It offers an incredibly fluid and informal communication experience that promotes authentic collaboration in ways that services like Skype never could. Although you may be 1,000 miles away, Side lets you collaborate with a partner with the same ease as if you were sitting side-by-side.
Research
The research conducted to understand the collaborative tools space included trend, future technologies, and market research as well as individual interviews of potential users.
Concept Development
Our concept development began with quick sketches of basic ideas and interactions. As we identified potential concepts that encouraged creativity in impactful ways, we began to give these ideas shape through user scenarios and acted these scenarios out with mock-ups until one concept stood out above the rest. That concept was Side.
Product Design Development
Having determined the key attributes of what Side should be and demonstrated how it can enhance collaboration across distances during our concept development phase, we set out to ensure Side’s design was flexible enough to adapt to the organic rhythms and needs of collaborators. Numerous physical prototypes were built, tested, and evolved via user feedback. The testing of these prototypes included our interface mockups to ensure the experience of both the physical and interface designs were cohesive.
+ Physical Design
We made specific hardware choices to bring more natural qualities to virtual communication, such as a unique camera system that enables collaborators to actually look their partners directly in the eye and a display that enables you to see them at a natural physical scale. To compliment its open workspace environment, we worked to reduce Side’s visual footprint and developed an aesthetic that blends in with its surroundings. We also made it stowable.
+ UX/UI Design
The Side user experience was designed to support flexibility and fluidity in people’s workflows when ideating together. It supports the moments of independent exploration as well as collaborative sharing.
We incorporated natural gestures and UI behaviors that reflect real-life whiteboarding. Sharing something like a simple sketch no long requires snapping a photo on your phone and going through the tedious experience of “file sharing”. Just lift the sketch up to your display and it will be scanned directly to the board you and your partner are looking at.
The greatest challenge of designing Side’s interface was creating a seamless experience across 4 different screens and working through some mind-boggling technical limitations.
+ Visual Design
We used the product attributes and design principles from earlier concept development to derive the right visual style for our product. We explored various styles through mood boards and master studies until we found a look and feel that complimented the idea of creative collaboration in the workplace.
Our general color palette is more muted to maintain a professional look while including bright and colorful accents to add a sense of energy and excitement. Our choices of typography and iconography were geared towards making the interface feel friendly and welcoming.
Final Prototype and Demo
Check out Side in action! The following are images of our final prototype and a demo video that shows a first person point-of-view of how the system works.
