Designing MADE, an Augmented Reality Application for Macromolecule Visualization

The MADE (Molecular Augmented reality for Design and Engineering) application is an augmented reality (AR) tool that affords users the ability to visualize complex macromolecules in an interactive and exploratory environment. The process to develop and design MADE required a thorough analysis of user segments, which informed the commercial prospects of MADE’s smartphone and HoloLens application. To determine the user’s needs and corresponding value propositions, a set of customer discovery interviews were conducted with individuals from MADE’s potential user segments. Through the customer discovery process, active user engagement revealed unique value propositions and helped identify user segments of higher education students and professors and life science professionals. For the aforementioned user segments, the design of the MADE application serves as an educational tool for enhanced learning experience, as well as a collaboration tool for exploratory drug development and discovery. The discovery and design process for MADE revealed viability of the application for commercialization in the higher education and life science profession markets. This paper discusses the processes of research and design of the MADE application.