Information Design for Small Screens: Toward Smart Glass Use in Guidance for Industrial Maintenance

Background: Smart glasses and other extended reality (XR) solutions provide new ways of utilizing technical documentation with hands-busy tasks in the field. Scaling up the use of XR solutions in industry has been difficult due to the manual authoring of content for each device and task. Therefore, authoring solutions and information design methods need to be developed to scale content automatically to different devices and applications. Literature review: Related work includes smart glasses and industrial maintenance work, categorization based on users' skill levels, and standardized guidelines in information design. Research questions: 1. How should information content be designed and created to support use in smart glasses and other small-screen devices in addition to existing delivery channels? 2. How can the same information content be utilized to deliver relevant content to users based on their skill levels? 3. Are the users of technical instructions ready to accept smart glasses and XR as a delivery channel? Methodology: We describe a study that focused on designing maintenance instructions for small screens. The information was authored in DITA XML format, and a smart glass application was used in user tests to evaluate the delivery and usability of the information. We used thinking aloud and participant observation as well as questionnaires to collect data. Results and discussion: The chosen information design methods successfully compressed technical information, and automatic filtering of content supported different use cases. Participants were enthusiastic about the use of smart glasses, and the instructions helped in performing tasks. Conclusions: Information designed with the user-centered approach of minimalism works best with instructions on small screens, and filtering information using DITA XML elements is an efficient way to scale information for different user needs.