Video Wall Application
Project Role: Primary UX Designer
Audience
This product is intended for a broad audience which includes office workers, administrative assistants, tour guides, educators, students and anyone interested in showcasing the power of large scale video walls.
Context
The video wall management application is a tool which allows users without expert knowledge of AV systems to control the content on the wall. This is a mobile application intended for tablet devices.
Example of a large video wall. Our goal is to provide a lightweight management tool that would allow inexperienced users to manage the content.
Goals
Create a seamless, multi-platform sharing application that's easy to download and use.
Allow users to replace sources, size content appropriately and recall presets in order to update content within the video wall.
Provide several levels of user access for more advanced permissions.
Provide an updated and brand consistent visual appearance.
Set a precedent and create a pattern library for applying gesture driven interfaces in other Extron products.
Some early concepts of selecting and resizing content windows
An early concept of locking the aspect ratio to keep the window ratio consistent.
Process
Since Extron already provides the hardware and software for video wall configuration, our first step was to review and leverage existing functionality from their configuration software and apply it in terms of mobile patterns and behavior. After reviewing existing software, competitors and new requirements we began by creating concepts for mobile platforms(Android, iOS, and Windows OS). We plan to conduct two rounds of usability testing: one to evaluate the overall initial concepts and then another closer to the end of development to ensure initial issues are resolved.
Activities
Wireframing and Prototyping
Competitive evaluation
Multi-platform Design
Plans for iterative usability testing
An example demonstrating the drag and drop feature to recall a preset. This concept was prototyped in Axure.
Challenges
Lack of live preview - had to determine an appropriate way to create a link between sources within the application and what users were viewing on the live video wall.
Real estate - Our configuration software runs on laptop and desktop devices, but we had to make some choices to ensure that features and functionality would be appropriate for the smaller screens and larger touch targets of a mobile environment.
Variation - There is no such thing as a typical video wall. Their configurations can be portrait or landscape oriented, and vary tremendously in sizes. We had to ensure that the mobile application would be robust enough to account for a variety of scenarios.
Results
This product is currently under development, and is awaiting the first round of usability testing. Product is expected to launch in Q3 of 2019.
Hi-fidelity view of the drag and drop interaction.
Hi-fidelity view of the zooming into and panning around the canvas.