Extract

Overview

Problem

Expert maintainers have years of valuable tacit knowledge that they take with them when they retire. More specifically, capturing an expert’s troubleshooting process is an extremely complex and mentally taxing activity.

Solution

EXTRACT is an augmented reality and web-based knowledge elicitation tool for maintainers that captures their expert knowledge and transforms it into a job performance aid for new recruits.

Role

Lead UX/UI Designer. I worked closely with my User Experience Researcher buddy Dr. Victoria Claypoole to establish the conceptual design of this project. I was also solely responsible for the UI work for both the web and AR portion.

Conceptual Design

Since typing in a HoloLens is tedious, we created a web portal where our expert could outline their process. After that, they push the process to their HoloLens, and capture media of their process as they do the task in the real world. Instead of the expert just typing in the steps of their process all willy-nilly, we guide the user through the process and ask scientifically-grounded probing questions to get at their tacit knowledge.

User Personas

After completing user interviews, I created two user personas for EXTRACT. First is our expert user who will be creating the guides...

...and our new guy who will be consuming the expert’s guides.

Sketches

We conducted initial user testing by asking our experts to use a diagramming tool to fully fill out their troubleshooting process for a specific problem. It soon became obvious that this approach caused some serious cognitive overload. We realized that a more guided process would be less taxing on our users, and result and better knowledge transfer.

Designs

Web Portal

Selecting guide type

Asking user to name guide by thinking back to a specific time this problem occurred

User describes the symptoms of the problem

Filling out one branch of the troubleshooting tree

Visual representation of the tree, user fills out remaining branches

User has sent guide to HoloLens

HoloLens

User sees list of guides they made in web portal

User opens up a guide and begins to capture media of their process

Hand menu for HoloLens 2 to select media capture modality. The gesture in the low-fi wireframe was abandoned in favor of a gesture that required more intent from the user to prevent accidental opening of the menu. The gesture shown in the hi-fi was designed to mimic the hand gestures of a photographer lining up a shot.