Maquette
(Microsoft Internship)

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FTUE Tutorial and Materials in Maquette

Microsoft VR Internship

During my Microsoft internship, I led the design and development of my 2 intern projects, a first time user tutorial feature and materials implementation in Maquette (http://maquette.ms), a spatial prototyping tool, now available on Windows Store and Steam VR.
First time user tutorial:

Materials:

I determined what I'd do for Maquette using user-centered design. While brainstorming ideas for my projects, I brought in users and observed their behaviors and comments around the product. I then designed my projects based on what users seemed to want most.
For example:
First time users were most confused about how to do basic things like object placement and manipulation. Thus, I decided to create a first time user tutorial to solve this need.
Long time users desired materials to help them differentiate vastly different elements (e.g. UI vs environments).
After designing, I began to develop each feature with the iterative prototyping technique. The first version of each feature would meet bare minimum requirements to be usable. I'd then test it amongst my target audience (e.g., first time users), collate feedback, and address the most commonly brought up issues. Repeat this about 3 times until satisfied. Here is an example of iterative prototyping of the tutorial:


I learned quite a bit, especially about backwards compatibility, shader coding (I wrote the first versions of all 10 shaders available for the Materials feature!), iterative design, event-based programming, state machines, and more. It helped a lot that everyone on my team was pretty good at coding and always willing to look over my code.
Hope you enjoyed this short blurb about my experience interning at Maquette. Other than the work, I found the people incredible as well. I was pleasantly surprised to go into work everyday, excited about what I was going to do - that's pretty rare! Maybe it's because I love working on consumer products that I feel help users accomplish their goals. Highly tempted to go back.. I doubt anyone reads this, but if you've read this far, thank you and have a great day~

Technologies Used: