Matterport mobile app
Matterport app
The Matterport app, available on both iOS and Android, allows users to turn any physical space into a dimensionally accurate 3D model.
From July 2021 – November 2022, my primary responsibility was the Supernova design system. I contributed to our mobile apps as a supporting designer. The following December, I took over as lead designer for mobile, getting to work on some cool projects. Check out a few of them below 👇🏾
3D minimap
Historically, the Matterport app has been capture-centric. The primary goal for most users was to create a job, "capture" (scan) their space, then upload it to Matterport's cloud platform. The space would then be processed server-side where it would turn into an interactive 3D space, if viewed on the web. The space remained in 2D on the mobile app.
The 2D minimap provides a simplified overhead view of your captured space, somewhat akin to a floor plan. Users might prefer this view when they need a quick and bird's-eye overview of the space's layout. It allows for easy navigation between different rooms or areas and provides a straightforward representation of the space's structure.
The 3D minimap offers a more immersive and realistic representation of the captured space. Users might prefer this view when they want a more detailed and spatial understanding of the space, something that was borne out of past research studies.
It's important to note, you're looking at the 3D minimap of an unprocessed space. When users upload their space, our computer vision engine goes to work aligning and registering the panoramic images and depth data, reconstructing a 3D model of the space, mapping textures onto the surfaces, applying lighting and shading effects, and so much more. The final, processed space is much higher quality.
As part of this work, I got the opportunity to improve the gestures used to interact with your space across touch, trackpad, and mouse modalities. Because the 3D minimap in the mobile app leverages the 3D view from our web app (which is embedded on sites like Redfin, apartments.com, Vacasa, etc.), a seemingly small proposal to improve gestures means proposing an improvement to the way millions of people interact with Matterport spaces. A snippet of the process 👇🏾
Minimap loading states and memory management tradeoffs, an improved UX for the selection of individual scan points, and smooth, almost magical transitions from 2D to 3D are some of the finer points of my design contributions.
The introduction of the 3D minimap brings us one step closer to bridging the gap between the capture-centric mobile experience, and the feature-rich, "do everything" web platform. The design of the app is rapidly changing to accommodate such a shift in capability. It's very exciting!
New user onboarding
Onboarding is hard. Our user base and use cases are broad, and the Matterport app is inherently complex. We've had numerous iterations over the years, which naturally, leads to a bit of a mangled experience and convoluted code base.
After digesting some interesting research from the Nielsen Norman Group and Apple, we arrived at a phased approach of experience updates aimed at improving usability by letting users know what's next without forcing them to interact with specific elements. Our hypothesis was and still is that the best way to learn Matterport is simply to use it.
To that end, the app's onboarding now includes a collapsible checklist of to-dos which updates as users complete tasks, expanded and optional guidance for certain features, improved empty states, and a redesigned upload button — the most important action once a space has been scanned.
As mentioned, our approach to improving onboarding is phased. Some other experience wins coming soon include:
- Priming for permissions and adjusting permission requests to appear at runtime
- Guiding users and building expectations upon their first successful upload
- Helpful, timely reminders
- General UI updates that improve consistency and leverage the latest design patterns from Apple and Google
UI sounds
I collaborated with my manager (at the time) to create our first version of UI sounds done in-house. Using our amateur production skills, we were able to collaborate with a sound designer who then leveled up our initial work. Here's a sample 👇🏾
More
Aside from audio, I worked on numerous quality of life improvements to the app, integration with camera hardware, and a research-backed redesign of the marking features tool.
