The Surface Hub is an interactive whiteboard developed and marketed by Microsoft, as part of the Microsoft Surface family. The Surface Hub is a wall-mounted or roller-stand-mounted device with a touchscreen that has multi-touch and multi-pen capabilities running the Windows operating system. These devices are targeted for businesses to use while collaborating and videoconferencing.
MY ROLE
Design strategist
Lead interaction designer
Visual designer
CHALLENGES
Microsoft acquired Jeff Han's Perceptive Pixel, which had previously developed large-screen multi-touch displays such as the CNN Magic Wall. Microsoft intended to mass-produce the devices with Windows as the operating system, which inherently broke all of the existing UI experiences on the device.
Sell a design-led culture into an engineering-centric environment.
IMPACT
My responsibility as the lead UI designer was to redesign the existing UI on the device to seamlessly work within the Windows ecosystem.
I partnered with the founder of Perceptive Pixel and his engineering team to design a new set of pen and touch UI experiences that resulted in UI patterns that still run on the device today.
Above, I am presenting to the founder and inventor of Perceptive Pixel, Jeff Han (on the right).
Below are a few examples of the UI experiences I created for the code name, LSX (large screen experiences).
When I kicked off the project, I needed to set context on what it meant to design for public computing experiences. I invented the ‘spectator’ and ‘performer’ vernacular that was adopted by our team when speaking about our personas.
Above, I created these three categories of public computing paradigms. We used these categories as a foundation when designing our UI solutions.
Inspiring through storytelling. I hired a storyboard artist to help illustrate our environments and key scenarios to inspire our team with our UX vision for this new computing paradigm.
Walk up and Use. The critical use case ‘walk up and use’ is defined as a series of UI affordances and experiences that enabled our users to successfully understand and interact with our device successfully from the first time they interact with the device. A majority of our users were first time users.
High-level task flow for the ‘walk up and use’ use case.
A sample of the many UI sketches for the ‘walk up and use’ core use case.
Early prototype movie I created. We would view these on the actual device during our design reviews.
Lead designer for the hero application, Whiteboard.
Above is one of the early prototypes I designed for the whiteboard app experience. Early on, we considered duplicating the UI experience to enable seamless, real-time collaboration. After prototyping and testing, we found it was overkill and not useful for real-time collaboration. Usually one person was writing and the other was observing.
This is the final UI that is still used today.