Design probes study on user perceptions of a smart glasses concept

Until today, mobile computing has been very much confined to conventional computing form factors, i.e. laptops, tablets and smartphones, which have achieved de facto design standards in outlook and shape. However, wearable devices are emerging, and especially glasses are an appealing form factor for future devices. Currently, although companies such as Google have productized a solution, little user research and design exploration has been published on either the user preferences or the technology. We set ourselves to explore the design directions for smart glasses with user research grounded use cases and design alternatives. We describe our user research utilizing a smart glasses design probe in an experience sampling method study (n=12), and present a focus group based study (n=14) providing results on perceptions on alternative industrial designs for smart glasses.