Requirements Documentation, User Flows, Prototype, Wireframing
About this project
The TS3 Touchscreen is an offline user interface for controlling a multiroom audio system. It is mounted in the wall and hardwired to a central control system. Like it’s predecessor, it features a combination of mechanical and software buttons for user input along with visual, tactile and audible feedback.
My Involvement
I specified and designed multiple new screens to support the Russound DMS-3.1 streaming media player. The TS3 is the successor to the highly successful TS2 touchscreen and carried over a lot of UI elements including the industrial design and existing screens. This meant that with all the features in the new screen designs, they also needed to respect and leverage existing UX design attributes where beneficial. This presented notable challenges as new features needed to fit within the constraints of the existing industrial design, information architecture structure, and interaction design methodology.
Requirements Documentation
After performing thorough research and competitive analysis to identify market opportunities, the TS3 features and functionality were documented in a Product Requirements Document. This served as the cornerstone for the project using Waterfall for hardware development. Scrum was used for the embedded software development to the value of this artifact was secondary to collaborative communication.
User Flows
All features were broken out into tasks and User Flows were created to support the interaction design, identify conditional logic and limitations while eliminating redundancy. I used Axure to create the User Flows.
Wireframes
Annotated wireframes were then created. Each screen element was detailed with its behavior based on use case. I used Axure again as this work would be leveraged for prototype development. While Axure does provide wireframe annotations natively, I chose to create a template for better viewing when sharing or printing.
Prototype
The TS3 prototype provided a functional guide for software developers to interact with and was used with participants during usability testing. This allowed concepts and ideas for how users might interact specifically with the DMS-3.1 Media Streamer to be iteratively tested and revised based on testing and developer feedback. This also became a powerful tool in presenting the project to key stakeholders during progress update meetings. As part of an agile process, this was a valuable artifact supporting collaborative discussions with development teams without requiring heavy documentation.
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