Field Tags
When you step into a Matterport space, you're not just looking around—you're exploring. But sometimes, you want to dig deeper, learn more, and get additional context about what’s right in front of you. That’s where Matterport's tags come in. They let you pin information directly to any part of your space, enabling you to tell richer stories and guide visitors through a more detailed exploration. With tags, your virtual space becomes more than just a visual experience—it becomes an interactive journey.
Overview
Native app users users, often referred to as “field operators”, have the power of context folks in the back office do not. They can identify important data while scanning and have the best context and ability to annotate them immediately. However, field operators have never had the ability to tag. That belonged to folks in the back office using Workshop (our web app).
- Increased user engagement
- Reduced error / data loss
- Improve scanner communication w/ backoffice
Challenge
Field Tags has been discussed within the company and externally with trusted users for a long time. We accumulated a wealth of feedback. This lengthy discovery process allowed us to identify the core issues field operators were having without the ability to tag in the field.
Often times, the person scanning a space is not the person adding room labels, trimming the model, taking measurements, etc. Information can get lost in translation. Depending on what gets lost and how much of it gets lost, the implications could be massive.
There can be lots of details about space that are not easily visible in the final, processed model. That could include things behind closed doors, small details, additional measurement data (e.g., moisture meter readings). Folks in the field have the best context.
Field operators tend to have a limited amount of time to scan a space. Sometimes, because of a lack of context, field operators have to go back to a space to rescan some or all of it. This can cost time and money.
As Matterport users scale in the complexity and frequency of their Matterport usage, there is an increase in space creation friction, slowing their growth.
Solution
Allowing users to capture data in the field directly into their job while scanning will enhance their workflow efficiency, improve data accuracy, and increase the overall value of Matterport to the user.
To that end, we should allow field operators the ability to do everything they can do in Workshop Tags. Minimize cognitive burden of a completely different UX. From here we determined we should audit the existing Workshop Tags experience. Determine what works well, what needs improvement, and what doesn’t work well.
From here we had a good understanding of what might be slowing down the tagging process either by adding confusion or simply too many steps to accomplish the task. From there we were able to design solutions.
What's next
I’m working on a diary study with our UX Researcher aimed at measuring if our solutions notably improve how field operators work. Here’s a snippet of what we’d like to understand 👇🏾
- Does adding a tag feel straightforward?
- If not, could users find help?
- Roughly how long does it take to add a useful tag.
- What would users do it they weren’t able to tag in the field?
- Does the extra step of adding tags impact other parts of the process?
- What are users tagging?
- When are users adding tags?
- Do users collaborate with other people in the back office for tagging?
- How do users communicate?