GOOGLE LENS REDESIGN
Google Lens
In 2017 Google I/O, Google introduced Google lens and how it leverages Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence to provide customers with a brand new way of understanding almost everything around us with the slogan “Scan what you see” and it immediately caught my eyes.
Motivation
Humans have been always trading. Since early age people bartered in ancient markets, attractive items such as cowrie shells or beads were exchanged for more useful commodities. Over the last two centuries trade has grown remarkably, completely transforming the global economy. Today about one-fourth of total global production is exported.
Currently, Google already has an expansive coverage in the industry of traveling overseas with its products: Google maps (navigation), Google assistant (recommendations), Google photos (travel photos) and Google translate (foreign language). Google Translate apps have even a feature which can do instant camera translations, they are extremely useful, helping tourists, and all sorts of people to break through language barriers.
However, when it comes to international traveling not only there will be language barriers. There are also many other barriers between countries. I found out there is a gigantic market in the shopping experience waiting to be explored. And I see the opportunity of filling this service gap with the help of Google Lens technology considering its capability and scalability.
Therefore I collaborated with Gaby from Georgia Institute of Technology, we resonated with tailoring Google Lens to an overseas shopping oriented scenario.
Traveling abroad is fun, but shopping abroad could be overwhelming. This project is a study to figure out what struggles people have during shopping overseas and figure out solutions to conquer them.
Affinity Diagram
We conducted seven interviews (one of them is a Daigou) to delve into the most common issues people encounter and have an understanding of what users’ needs and pain points.
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Affinity diagram helped us to distill the needs and interestingly found that
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Users tend to convert the local currency to their home currency
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Users want to convert units in many situations
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Users solicit advice from their family/friends when shopping
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Promotions in another country are hard to understand, Users want to be informed about promotions
Personas
Competitive Analysis
Before we design the converter, we wonder how existing products are serving for users and what our strength and weakness are.
There are numerous apps providing currency converting services. We read user reviews of 14 apps and downloaded 9 of them. Typically users type in the number in one currency, selecting a country from the long lists, and choose the the currency they want to convert. System replies back with the value or other alternative currencies.
XE Currency exchange is at 35 places of the top traveling apps chat in Google play store
Our strength is by leveraging the strong and solid AR provided by Google Lens, users can have a brand new approach of converting currency — directly seeing the converted price with eyes effortlessly, instead of requiring users to type the price themselves.
This innovation makes the converting currency process much more convenient, fun and effective.
However, the current Google lens provides service only when connected to the internet. When users travel, especially in another country, getting access to the internet may not be a piece of cake.
XE currency exchange app interface
User story
XE Currency vs. Currency Converter APP
We look at one of the most popular converter apps XE Currency during the competitor research. The homepage welcomes users with a straightforward purpose: showing how much a dollar values at Euro, Pound, or Canadian Dollar. The other one is CurrencyConverter, in which users check one currency convert to the other only.
Our takeaway is we can do one-to-one converting because an overseas traveler needs to convert the currency where s/he is physically located to his/her own home currency, and a lot of options could be redundant and annoying if it takes too much space in an AR-based app.
Workflow
Hand Sketches
Design Alternative
With the idea in mind, I quickly drew out 2 alternatives and thought about the pros and cons.
1
Pros:
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Allow fast currency switching
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Correspond with the existing UI flow
Cons:
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More complicated, required user to select the price tag first. Might cause more errors
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Time consuming
2
Pros:
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Fast and intuitive
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Saving time when comparing multiple products' prices
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It can automatically hide/disappear when the user is in his home country
Cons:
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Unable to fast switching different currency
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More engineering workload
Option 2 provides a more instant and seamless conversion experience compare to the first design. The first design requires the user to select the price tag first and click on convert. However, currently in the app, products can be tapped by users to search images/products' information through a google search. There's a high chance that users can make mistakes which want clicking on the product for currency converts or trying to click on the price for search prices on different e-commerce websites. In comparison, the second option real-time automatic conversion is easier to use and can support fast multiple price comparisons which would be very beneficial for Oversea shoppers (Daigou).
Is this idea feasible?
I like to consider the feasibility of my design even when I don't have access to a project engineer.
Two important questions about this design idea are
1) How can the app recognize a number as a price or unit?
2) Is Google Lens able to change the overlay of a text or number on top of the original price tag in real-time?
Firstly, I did a small investigation in a shopping mall and places like Ikea, most of the stores in China have ￥ signs beside the number to indicate it's a price. And units are stated clearly, which current google lens can easily recognize by the existing OCR technology.
For countries like the US and Canada, using the same $ sign for their currency and it can be solved by integrating location information or IP address to determine the currency
For the second question, Google translate has a feature called instant camera translate which can translate text in an image instantly by just pointing the camera at a foreign language. Therefore, I believe our design can be built and realize by Google's technologies.
Google Translate
Google Translate
Wireframes
Remote work requires real-time collaboration, so we went with Figma to ensure we are on the same page. We tested with three potential customers and make sure the flow is functional and understandable after three iterations.
Real-time currency and unit conversion
Foreign currency and unit will be converted automatically in real-time
High-fidelity prototypes
Google Lens Search
(add to favorite)
After Google Lens detected one commodity, users can add it to the Favorites.
