Re-design and usability improvement of Arvue : an AR application displaying house models in their real context

Abstract: Building your own house may be the biggest decision and greatest investment of your life, which calls for an informed decision regarding the house design. However, two-dimensional drawings may lack external context and might, for untrained eyes, not communicate how the house will look on its intended site. With the use of augmented reality, the company Softhouse Neava AB has developed an application, Arvue, that gives users the ability to display digital house models in full scale at their intended site. Arvue is intended to help architectural firms in communicating house designs with their clients and through this, enhance their clients' experience of the designing process and decision making process. However, the user interface of Arvue lacks in usability, and when creating the interface, no usability testing was conducted. The objective of this thesis is to re-design the user interface of Arvue, with the aim to enhance its usability.  The prototype was developed using the design thinking process, which was iterated two times. This process consists of five phases - empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test. During the empathize phase, potential users were interviewed about their thoughts on usability and their knowledge and thoughts on AR. During the define phase, personas and user need statements were created based on the interview data. The user need statements were then used as a base for the brainstorming sessions in the ideate phase. Finally, a prototype was created and usability tested in two iterations.  To measure if the aim of this thesis was met, the System Usability Scale was used to grade both the current user interface of Arvue and the prototype, to compare the results. The current user interface scored an average of 49,5 or a grade F, meaning that the usability is below average. The prototype scored an average of 88 or a grade A+, meaning that the usability is above average. This indicates that the usability of the user interface has been enhanced, and thereby the aim of the thesis has been met.