MakerBot Method
The Method series of 3D Printers are the culmination of many teams working together for several years to produce an amazing, intuitive, and high performance machine. I was fortunate enough to be part of this effort and lead several aspects of its development.
Material Design
The material design system will have an ever expanding amount of new materials, printers and extruders. The design system had to be flexible as it scaled. This was achieved with on printer graphical markings, RFID, supporting UI, and several other badges and stickers.
Touch Base
A 5 inch capacitive touch screen is the main interaction point of the machine. We based the main design hierarchy off of modern smart phone OS’s. Major functions like printing, settings, loading, and info are located on the “home screen” of the printer. Due to the paradigms of 3D printing user interactions still being defined, the team relied heavily on 3D rendered walk throughs of more complex mechanical tasks to ensure there was no ambiguity in user instruction.
User Testing
Since design, firmware and hardware development schedules rarely aligned we did several “man behind the curtain” user tests moving motors and providing physical feedback to provide as accurate an experience as possible. A version of the front panel of the printer was created where a phone running invision mockups could be used as a stand in for testing on screen workflows. Presenting user flows to key stakeholders was done digitally but also through physical prints that filled up an entire conference room for several weeks. The physical medium allowed for rapid markup, changes and feedback in real time from non designers. Over a hundred tests were done with new employees, engineers, and outside subjects which resulted in 5 out of 5 ratings from our beta testers on “ease of use”.
Walkthrough Animation Example
Design Team
Vishnu Anantha, Felipe Castaneda, Mark Palmer, Jackson Seidenberg, Yanqiong Zeng.
Responsible For:
All digital and physical UI/UX interactions and specification documents.
Communication and reviews to leadership, product managers, tech leads, and third party contractors.
All physical artwork including packaging, guides, stickers and manuals.
Marketing videos, renders and support collateral for the product launch.