Ario — Kara Valdon

Ario Technologies

UX Research | Product Design | Creative Direction

As a Product Designer and Creative Director at Ario, I’ve had the pleasure and challenge to design for the front line workforce. Our mission, driven by Augmented Reality, streamlines remote communication, promotes knowledge sharing and solves problems for deskless and remote teams and individuals.

Joe Weaver, CEO

Steve Madsen, iOS Developer

Robert Chrzanowski, Android Developer

Josh Forisha, Web Developer

Blaine Price, DevOps Engineer

Adam Becerra, Jr. Software Developer

Jacob Galito, Creative Director

Kara Valdon, UI/UX

Notable Projects:

Ario Connect App

Video calling application for iOS, Android and web leveraging simple, but powerful AR tools.

UX customer discovery
Wireframe, hi-fi, prototyping
Copy, app store and marketing

Verizon & Samsung Collaboration

Worked closely with Verizon and Samsung to display Ario Connect on the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra with Verizon 5G UW network in a 60-second video demonstrating Connect’s AR and video communication features.

Design System & Documentation

Cross-platform component, color, type, layout, icon, language and branding outlines and documentation in Figma made in conjunction with a recent rebrand effort.

Launching Ario Connect | Verizon & Samsung Collaboration

Ario had the opportunity to work with teams at Verizon and Samsung to test network capabilities and demonstrate the core value of Connect’s remote communication tools (AR drawing, libraries of 3D objects, and interacting with sophisticated 3D models) on Verizon’s network, displayed on the new release of Samsung’s Galaxy S22 Ultra.

Ario Connect Application

Video Calling with Augmented Reality for iOS, Android and Web

Design Challenges

Open onboarding barriers to prospective small business consumers and teams while catering to current enterprise clientele.

Simplify idioms, iconography, and flows within the video calling interface to improve calling experience and intuitive interactions.

Expand and iterate the existing 1:1 video communication feature set to include new core-features, tools and value to best serve the remote work force.

Deliberately identify and leverage the most valuable AR tools for users through user research and observation of Connect in practice with clients.

Design Process | Ario Connect’s Second Iteration

Research, Surveys & Interviews

Conducted rounds of survey screening and gathered quantitative data followed by participant interviews across manufacturing, telecommunications, fleet and field services, trucking, warehousing and energy & utilities industries. Our primary research was supplemented by data from white papers and articles on remote work, communication and how people learn.

Frontline, remote work force lack on-demand access to materials, relying on experts, managers and supervisors to direct them in a remote environment, often leading to stalls in productivity depending on availability of those experts, failures in communication, loss of knowledge capture and 1:1 interactions that leave other members in the team behind.

People prefer to problem-solve on their own and feel empowered doing it, creating a culture and expectation of self-service. Workers, clients and customers ask for help from support teams or team member after they’ve exhausted their self-guided efforts.

Desk-bound workers suffer from product noise, while there desk-less counterparts bootstrap ways to communicate. Communication streams on personal devices and apps, and one-off interactions splinter the collective communication efforts of the team and ongoing projects.

2. Synthesis & Design Solves

Ario Connect is positioned to expand it’s core functions beyond 1:1 video communication by incorporating short form micro-learning with AR-tools and leverage the power of asynchronous communication and learning through video and visual media.

Shaped by this set of design solutions, Ario Connect iterates as a telecommunication service to a comprehensive knowledge-centered service.

This new direction and expanded core function of Ario Connect are supported by indexing content, content management in groups, channeling communication and investigating how spoken audio can be indexed in text through captioning, creating an powerful search experience to locate information for education. and troubleshooting on-demand.

3. Sketching out Solutions > Presenting to Team

The new feature set addresses gaps in remote communication by focusing on AR-enhanced video recording, async messaging, async learning and comprehensive video content creation made searchable and offered on-demand to teams by indexing each video though voice-to-text technologies.