Real-time Engine UX Case Study

About GritWorld

?? Location: Lurgiallee 14, 60439 Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

GritWorld GmbH was founded in December 2015 by Dr. Wu Xiaomao in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Shortly after it's founding, several top investors have joined in. Now the company has new offices in Shanghai and Guangzhou, China, to support the Chinese clients.

Their core development focuses on real-time graphics & rendering technologies and real-time large-scale 3D reconstruction technologies, summarized as their digital engine. The current applications on top of the digital engine target different industrial fields including cartoon animation & film, smart city management & industrial simulation, high-dimension data visualization, large-scale commodity digitization and advertisement. they promote digital transformation in these fields, improve production efficiency and the user experience.

GritGene

Is a new digital engine that is currently being built.

The engine is flexible (low-end hardware / high-end GPU clusters on the cloud), scalable (using multi-GPU) and with this engine, we will enable ourselves to innovate the way human and computer interact.

Background

The company is developing its own real-time engine. With a real-time engine the user can create virtual worlds and it can be used to produce many different things. Whether he wants nice-looking stills for architecture, smaller applications such as car info systems or complex products such as games or film/animation, with a real-time engine you have many possibilities.

It does not really matter for which purposes the user uses this engine, there are a few elements you always need:

- A viewport (this is where you see your virtual world)

- A scene hierarchy (an advanced list of everything that is in this virtual world)

- An inspector (all the properties of the currently selected object in the virtual world)

- An Asset Browser/Manager (here you manage all the assets that you use in your project)

The Challenge (The Asset Browser)

The Asset Browser (or Manager) is one of the core elements of a real-time engine, as users will manage their assets in this window and add them from here to their scene. Whether it is meshes, materials, animations or textures; everything should be available for the user.

The user treats this as the core library for his project(s).

The Challenge was to design an Asset Browser for the engine. with the following requirements:

- I have a complete overview of the structure of my project

- I can see thumbnails or a list of my files

- I can change the size of the thumbnails

- I can (easily) see detailed information (i.e. preview, resolution, file format) from my files

- I can filter file types

- I can search for files

- I can import new files

- I can remove files

- I can cut/copy/paste/duplicate files

- I can move files

- I can add files to my scene

- I can have bookmarks of folders

My passion on every project is to understand the "WHY" behind the project and the company passion so I can deliver that message to the target audience based on Human-Factor Psychology, Research, Design Pattern, and other human-computer interaction methodologies. 

"UX Strategy lies at the crossroads of UX design and business strategy. It’s a plan-of-action on how to find out if the user experience of a product is aligned with the business objectives (Levy, 2015). It is used to create an understanding between designers and the goals of the business/product/feature. More specifically, it’s a document of guidelines and rules that outline how the design team aims to achieve the organization/product objectives. Every part of the strategy should be researched, vetted and approved by relevant stakeholders (Hoekman, 2015)."

Short Summary

The presented Mockup is considered to be the optimum alternative that has complied with the 12 requirements needed to be covered of the Challenge.

It also provides wide view for the user that is considered one of the most important issues of the User-Usability of the project. However, It might not be the best alternative for future extensions as the requirements

were very limited. In case there was an intention to add more features; for example adding items or previewing 3D or more details need to be presented.

As a result, other alternatives, as shown in the Ideation trials part, might be more convenient for the future

extensions. Due to the limited time of the Challenge duration as well as the other projects that I have been engaged in, I could only work on the challenge only in my free-time. Adding to this, the challenge is considered to be a long-term project.

Through this challenge, I was able to present my skills in Sketching, Ideation and Prototyping in a reasonable way despite the limited time.

It's easy to do Wireframe, Design, Mockups and other things that UI/UX person does, but my Mockup is more about Functionality rather than just visual.

Ideation Trials

Alternatives, might be more convenient for the future extensions, In case there was a need to add more features; for example adding items or previewing 3D or more details need to be presented.

Design (Paper Prototyping)

Brainstorming with pen and paper for early design exploration.