Samsung (CX-Lab)
The Customer Experience Lab was under Samsung Research America. Aside from developing future technology, I also contributed to shipped products.
Our work focused on the application of visual displays from TVs to toys to refrigerators.
2017
Motion Design For FRAME TV
I did a lot of motion redlining for The Frame TV. This was my first time redlining motion, and the engineers in South Korea needed insight as to how the UI elements moved and interacted. Later in the year Frame hit the market!
In the beginning, I had to explore and develop key motion features. (Left) looks into a depth-based UI navigation system, and (right) was experimenting with ambient motion art that informed while maintaining a minimal aesthetic.
Engaged Displays
The Everywhere Display project sought ways to use displays of varying sizes for pushing helpful, relevant information and functions to the user. I created boards for illustrating the core use cases and functions of the product. The team lead would come to me with a scenario script and I would produce these illustrations. She would then talk over them during the presentation as visual aids for leadership.
2016
New User Personas
Samsung’s CX-Lab had an awesome research team. The researches needed new personas for categorizing various user groups. Using their descriptions, I illustrated a series of personas like the "Holloways". Each persona I drew up came with a portrait shot and a mockup of how they might place their TVs in the home.
Living Canvas
In the earlier days of The Frame, our team was discussing ideas about how to best display artwork in novel ways. One of those was exploring how to give photography and artwork a sense of depth and life in subtle ways. I did a series of layer animation studies that explored this potential feature.
Family Hub 2.0 Avatars
The Family Hub team wanted user avatars to test that weren't photos of random people or things. My initial sketches were a hit and led to me designing a set of family-oriented monster avatars. They were included in the roll out of Family Hub 2.0!
2015
SammiE
Sammie was a children's toy prototype. During the project's cycle I had the pleasure of exploring the personality of this companion. I ended up making a facial rig in After Effects that allowed me to easily animate the mouth movements to a teammate's voice-over. (Turn your sound up if you like)
Television
Our lab took the initiative in pushing for an overhaul in the UX of Samsung's Smart Hub. What emerged was the "LUMI" menu system that debuted at CES 2016. Most of my time on the project was spent creating motion flows for menu navigation. This example looked into accessing the system menu.
Below were for a potential new category of TV. I had a lot of fun exploring the motion language and styling of the UI. These two were my favorites from over a dozen exploration passes.
2014
My first project was dabbling in hardware concept/design for the lab's audio team. I love taking ideas from a rough sketch into something more concrete and it was a great first project.
User Research Comic Book
The user research team had stacks of data that illustrated differences between American and South Korean TV viewing habits. They wanted to present their findings in a more engaging way than the usual PowerPoint filled with pie charts and graphs. I proposed to make a comic book where the research data was part of the story. I did everything myself, except the script; concepts, layout, pencils, inking, color, oversaw Korean localization, and secured the printing vendor. Within a year Digital City Mystery was born!
