How do we rapidly respond to issues customers are seeing with our hardware products?

WHAT IS IT?

The Vive Arcade program provides the capability for large scale (multi-room) deployments of Vive systems to arcades, Enterprise, and other environments. In late 2018, our business partners were contacting our sales and support teams to complain about various issues they were seeing with HTC’s hardware. Many of these potentially multi-million-dollar partnerships were threatening to take their business to other hardware suppliers, so it was imperative that we addressed their concerns in a timely manner.  

Hardware development and manufacturing cycles are lengthy, compared to the software product cycle, so it would not be possible to replace hardware at scale quickly. Driver and software issues can be fixed in situ but can be time-consuming for an account to deploy and without our ability to control the environment, the risk of introducing additional problems was not insubstantial. 

 

INFORMING THE DESIGN

DATA COLLECTION

To better understand how to design the foundational structure, I needed to research the issues that our customers were facing, brainstorm solutions, and determine how best to present a simple interface that would enable complex functionality. 

SYNTHESIS

KEY DRIVERS

Armed with the above knowledge, I evaluated and prioritized the inputs and worked with stakeholder to define the following experience pillars:

USER FLOW

The resulting user flow was intentionally minimal.

 

 

WIRES + ASSETS

With the urgency of quickly getting the project out the door, after about a week of synthesizing inputs and creating the user flow, I quickly created wireframe sketches. 

 

 

And within a day, I mocked up visual assets in Sketch for implementation.

EXECUTION

DOGFOODING

Using these assets, I creating a working alpha build of the tool in a little over a week. It was critical to start testing the application since there were key partners that considered the issues they were seeing as disruptive to their business operations.  In the span of a week, we were able to suss out major bugs and incorporate early usability feedback for a beta release distributed to the wider list of partners. 

 

CHALLENGES

HEADER ICONS MISTAKEN AS BUTTONS

Initially, the header icons were made as squares. Some partners mistook them as buttons. While not a huge UX issue, I decided it was better to adjust the UI design to avoid any confusion. 

HIDDEN DEVICES IN LIST

The device list is supposed to show you a list of available input/output audio devices. However, if the Vive wasn’t plugged in, it wouldn’t show up in the list. I had to create a “ghost list option” that would show the preferred device even when the Vive was not connected so that the preferred selected device was still displayed.

 

WHAT’S THE DEFAULT?

Some partners didn’t quite understand which device was supposed to be selected for audio input and output by default. I addressed this issue by adding a simple auto-set checkbox that set appropriate options that worked for the majority of users, liberating them from having to completely understand the option.  

 

Over the course of the following three weeks, I continued to work closely with our partners and incorporated additional feedback and feature requests. The tool was well received and further solidified trust with our current and new enterprise partners which ultimately led to a substantial increase in sales number and reduction in complaints to our enterprise support team by at least 50%. 

REFLECTION

FINAL THOUGHTS

 

While having a separate application was easier to manage for the internal team, it was more challenging for our partners to have to install and manage another piece of software. Ideally, the functionality would be integrated into the existing software that partners already had installed. 

The approach I would take now would be to tap into the framework that SteamVR has available for anyone to create custom tabs inside their Dashboard interface. This would accommodate an independent deployment schedule while enabling an integrated experience that doesn’t feel like another piece of software to ask our partners to manage.