For the manufacturing industry of the future, identifying problems and repairs in the production line should be fast and fixing the problem must be seamless. If a robotic arm were to break in a factory line, how could extended reality (XR) be used to solve this? This was the question asked by our Microsoft stakeholders. 

For this ask a Guide was built in Microsoft's Dynamics 365 Guides platform for the Microsoft HoloLens. The Guide used a Fischer Technik arm to emulate the use case for a large manufacturing line. Acting as the UX Lead I worked in a team of 4, with two other UX researchers and a dual role developer/3D modeler. This project had a two week timeline in June 2019. 

Research was conducted to assess the existing Factory of the Future solution being applied by our Microsoft stakeholders. Understanding our users and the context of when they would put on a HoloLens was important. Eliminating ambiguity for our users was key.

From there we storyboarded the Guide that would be built out for manufacturing users. The storyboard went through two revision cycles before finalization.     

Concurrently with storyboarding, we also built the Guide out. This is done on both PC and within the HoloLens, with 3D models positioned around Microsoft's world anchor inside the mixed reality environment. 

Photographs and videos were taken for certain steps of the Guide, to provide context to each step a user would walk through and mitigated confusion.

After building out the Guide, it was tested with new users to understand any issues with running the Guide. After conducting tests, iterations were made on the Guide in regards to wording of the instructions and placement of 3D models.