The Goal:
As professional and casual creatives grow their technical skills, the demand for higher quality of work and range of output increases as well. Many digital designer tools on the market today are limiting to the user and stringent in their functionality. How a designer constructs their workflow is imperative to their efficiency and quality of work. With this issue in mind, we will explore different ways for digital creatives to maximize their workflow by optimizing their tool’s physical interface. Digital designers could be offered a modular tool that lets them decide how they operate their hardware.
Existing product research
A critical first step to a project like this is understanding what current tools have to offer in terms of price, functionality, & mobility. Below shows a map of different product lineups that are graphed in relation to their user's ability & price, gathered from data I surveyed. The circles indicate buying averages across users. Please note, this graph below does not exhaust all aspects of research done for this project in its entirety.
Good, Better, & BEst
For this project, I had the opportunity to explore three different price points & quality of a similar product. The first step of this part of the project was to examine and study an existing product at a lower tier. I deconstructed Huion's cheapest tablet they had available & reconstructed it in SolidWorks. With this, I was able to better understand necessary components for internals & how far this level of model can go in a more expensive price range.
Concept development
After gathering all of the insights from research it was time for the ideation phase of the project. The main goal for this stage was focusing on the form of the tablet so that hardware can be made more convenient to the user. CMF exploration was minimal at this stage.
Prototyping
I used construction board to cut out various proportions of how the tablet could exist in relation to the remote systems. As I ideated on the remotes & hot keys, I kept proportions standardized so that there could be multiple configurations with different remotes.
CMF EXPLORATION
Different price points called for different materials capabilities. For the second best option of tablet design I opted for ABS plastic for the main casing & a contrasting solid color ICP for the contact area of the tablet. For the best tablet option, I went with anodized aluminum for the casing.
BETTER
BEST
CONCLUSION
For the best iteration I went with a display tablet that had access to a touch bar & higher quality remotes. Below you can see the comparisons between the "good", "better", and "best" versions of the tablet explorations: The aim for these remote systems is to allow the user to configure their setup any way that they need to according to their preferences.
