- March 31, 2017
Agile Hardware & Strategy
“Helping other early/seed-stage startups to build their products and strategy from scratch.”
We have partnered up with another venture firm “Innopresso” to help each other discover/improve our blind spots in business. In doing so, I served as an external advisor for the company with the responsibility of its 1) product design, 2) manufacturing strategy, and 3) crowdfunding. Through regular onsite meetings, I managed to consolidate the company’s initial strategies for crowdfunding and mass-production (MP), finalizing the product design to help them make progress.
The Product
“Mokibo” is the company’s first hardware that provides a multi-functional human interface that turns the entire surface of a mechanical keyboard into a large touchpad. It integrates a large-sized touchpad on a keyboard without a separate touchpad or mouse. This was made possible due to the smart mode-switching algorithm and motion-recognition technology. Since virtual keyboards on tablets are designed to be used on display screen, it can be easy to create typing errors, which can be particularly frustrating when working on a document. Smaller touchpads or joysticks are also not as convenient as a mouse. For this reason, many tablet users used to carry portable keyboards & mouse.
The motion keyboard “Mokibo”, developed by Innopresso, will soon be launched globally in late 2019 to solve some of these problems. It has been successfully backed/funded on Indiegogo, raising 155k (crowdfunding campaign), and recently introduced during MWC 2017.
The Interaction
Organizing onsite collaboration on a regular basis, I spent most of my time during this project, designing and setting up thresholds for the ‘Switching’ interaction when the transformation gets made from a keyboard to a touchpad. Since designing products and experiences are inextricably linked, we worked seamlessly together, crafting user experience so that users can switch modes intuitively without an awkward pause or delay.
Vimeo Link 01 Promotional Video
Tackling UX Challenges
Testing and demonstrating various major agenda in UX, such as tapping, swiping, and pinching through multi-touch, I have led the company’s decision making in usability and design engineering. Together, we have created thresholds for sensitivity and mechanical stability of each key on the keyboard as it is meant to function as a touchpad when the mode is on. With prototypes that helped us visually simulate the interaction, we were allowed to iterate experience prototypes scene by scene to verify these usability factors.
Vimeo Link 02 Interaction Demo
Final Touch & CMF Design
Last but not least, my responsibility in the project also covered creating compelling enclosure and CMF design (the product’s look and feel) to attract early adopters in the consumer electronics market. Collaborating with production engineers, the client team and I have achieved desirable finish on its enclosure design and led it to mass-production (MP) at the end. “Mokibo” is expected to be globally shipped by late 2019.
*Also generated a series of rendered images for the client’s reference and communication.
*CMF design can vary depending the product’s price point per each segment.
