AR Dictionary _ NetEase

My Role: UX Researcher & AR Model Developer

Tool: Unity, JavaScript, C++

Team: NetEase Youdao Dictionary Team

Duration: Aug. 2020-Oct. 2020

I joined the team at a time when the basic concept of the product is created, and the first few iterations are produced. However, more test should be done to perfect the product, and future changes are all on me.

Almost no kids in the world like looking through paper dictionaries to remember vocabularies. Those are heavy, and too stressed for kids. However, in such a digital world, how about we move the dictionary onto AR video games? I bet that kids will fall in love with learning new vocabularies if they can see squirrels eating nuts in their bedrooms, or lions running just in front of them. That’s what the team was trying to achieve.

My job in this project was to keep going to design & perfect the current product based on the users’ feedbacks and research results, changing those received negative comments, and adding those may have positive effects to the product.

In addition, my job also includes selecting appropriate raw models and making them alive into the product, making sure that the product is end to end and responsive enough. By adding colorful and real skins and lively animations using Unity, I created more than 500 AR animation models.

The biggest takeaway was inspired by working with one of our developers

I’ll always remember that afternoon when I ran to the develop team with an excited idea about the product’s new version, while ended up being told that’s kind of impossible to achieve. That’s when I realized that designers are not excluded by developing, and that’s when I started to get my hands on coding. Having basic developing knowledge is so important even for designers to concept audacious but responsible ideas.

After equipping myself with some of the developing knowledge, I even helped the develop team develop those AR models to relative types of files in order to make those models adaptive to both IOS and Android devices. Then, I also tackled the duty to upload those files onto the application terminal control system to finish the whole developing process.

“Ridiculous Comments” Matter

“The monkey is scary!” I was a little shocked when I saw one of the usability test feedbacks. This is neither a technical problem nor a content issue, rather, it’s merely like an emotional complaint, however, it matters. It’s clear that the user or his/her child is annoyed by the monkey jumping in the phone screen, and that’s where we have to make changes. I then changed the monkey model in the later iterations, and was relieved that I might saved a kid who is afraid of scary monkeys. Designing products for children is highly responsibility-driven, and the designers should be so careful about what they are designing to avoid ethic issues.