Snap AR - Location Feature Rollout

ROLE Technical UX Designer, AR Engineer
DATE 2022 - 2023
CLIENT Snap Inc.

Snap’s Location AR features allow experiences that are specific to the user’s surrounding city.

The Challenge
At Snap, I worked on the World AR team developing UX and promotional experiences for new features. I was tasked with overseeing usability for lens creators and end users with the roll-out of the City Scale AR feature. This involved creating the game engine template, the creator’s guide documentation, and demo lenses in participating cities.

Feature Template + Guide

I coded the template that was bundled with Lens Studio and wrote the associated Creator’s Guide.

To support beginner creators, I made an easily readable hierarchy. For more intermediate crators, I wrote simple and commented modular code that was easy to customize and cut-and-paste as needed.

This marked a big departure from past template methodologies that obfuscated what was going on in the code with rigid expectations of template use. My user advocacy was rewarded when the Custom Location template and guide was re-done to reflect the new methodology.

Template Topics:

Placing anchored content to a specific location
Tapping on any location to place content
Colliding with city buildings

Additional Material: I collaborated with the education team on a course on Location Lenses and co-hosted a livestream “Creating AR Experiences for Cities”.

Demo Collaboration Lenses

To promote City Scale AR I collaborated with LA’s Little Tokyo and the city of Santa Monica to create experiences highlight the history of the Little Tokyo neighborhood during Nisei Week Japanese Festival. I was responsible for pitching, wireframing and prototyping the user flow (including calibration and navigation). I then tested and reviewed the lens production team’s work for a successful launch.

My effectiveness supporting collaborations resulted in me being tapped to represent Snap AR in meetings with the Public Policy team with city officials in Santa Monica to introduce how AR can work for cities. The resulting brainstorm resulted in collaborating to create an AR walking tour of Broadway’s historically Black business corridor launched on Juneteenth.

Nisei Week Festival:
Aki's Stamp Rally

Lens published here.

Santa Monica History Museum:
Broadway to Freeway

Lens published here.

Ask me about: Machine Learning AR features, Discoverability for Location-based AR, Usability Concerns for Outdoor AR, Snap Academy Mentoring