Context

Goals

• The goal of this project was to design a tangible tool for collaboration that allows for multiple people to work collaboratively using digital and physical interaction. The assignment focused on creating a tangible user interface (TUI) needing physical controllers that users can manipulate to interact with digital screens. The project explored how physical interaction can enhance group collaboration, decision making, and engagement and interaction especially designing for such a large screen.

Team

• I worked in a team of four to design this project from end-to-end. Our process included problem definition, ideation, interaction design, prototyping, and testing and a lot of iterations. Each member contributed to a different aspect research, brainstorming, redesigns, interface concepting, physical object design with a lasercutter, storytelling for the final live demonstration, and much more. Working collaboratively helped us actually build out and using different perspectives to design this tool that should help different audiences of users.
• I primarily worked on concepts, iterating the product, and leading changes especially when building out the interface.

Why is a ‘Tool for Collaboration’ a Good Fit for Tangible Interface Design?

• A tangible interface works well for collaboration because it turns solo screen work into a shared, hands-on experience. It lets people move things together, making teamwork more natural and feel open to all. When everyone can interact physically, it’s easier to talk, share ideas, and make decisions as a group. The physical tools also help everyone stay equally involved and communicate much better in real time.
• It really also pushed us to think out of the conventional box of interface and screens we are familiar with. Trying to figure out how people can collaborate on a huge interface was a unique and interesting problem!

The Specific Problem and Team Goals

Our team focused on a challenge that all product teams face. Every week there are meetings and milestones to meet and the most difficult part is communicating and getting changes processed thought the team. It is so time consuming to collaboratively critique, refine, and understand on the best decisions across design, product, and engineering teams. Feedback is scattered across tools, decisions get lost in threads, and design variations are hard to track and follow through. The Agile workflow is all about working fast and small teams want the fastest, most efficient way to work fast.

Image source: https://www.cflowapps.com/agile-workflow/

We defined our problem area as:

“How might we design a tangible interface that enables design, product, and engineering teams to collaboratively explore, compare, and critique design to brainstorm iterating and shipping within milestones as soon as possible”

Project Goals

Our goal was to create a tangible collaboration system that allows product teams to work faster and more efficiently while keeping communication clear and decisions organized. The tool would let users present ideas, upload wireframes or mockups, generate new layout variations, compare them side by side, and use tangible controls to interact with feedback and decision-making in real time. We wanted to bridge the gap between ideation and critique and also make peoples lives easier by automating things like taking notes/comments/suggestions and converting them to tasks.

This problem was very important and appealing to us because it reflects a real and growing challenge in today’s fast-paced product environments. With technology and AI growing rapidly, teams are expected to iterate and deliver way way faster, yet collaboration often slows them down.

This project gave us the opportunity to rethink how teams make design decisions, using tangible interaction to make difficult processes and milestones much smoother and easier to achieve.

Our Solution