Blippar · Augmented Reality Platform

Designing a Medium
Before It Knew What It Was For.

The technology was ready. The behavior wasn't.

Role Product Design Lead
Scope Consumer AR · Creator Tools · Platform
Focus Emerging Technology · AR Adoption · Interaction Design
Museum gallery scene with a subtle AR context layer around a sculpture

Blippar emerged during the earliest wave of consumer Augmented Reality (AR), when the technology was advancing faster than people understood how it fit into everyday life.


The platform could identify almost anything a camera pointed at — a face, a landmark, a product on a shelf. The prevailing assumption was that recognition itself would become the killer feature.


But recognition alone wasn't enough to create a lasting habit.

BlippBuilder final product interface showing timeline authoring, spatial clarity, widgets, and progressive complexity
Primary Work
Building for a medium still taking shape

Much of my work focused on BlippBuilder, the platform's AR creation tool. The challenge was helping people create experiences for a medium that still had few established conventions.


From assembling to authoring, the rebuilt BlippBuilder made AR behavior easier to sequence, edit, and understand, turning creation into something you could follow instead of a surface you had to decode.

The challenge

The technology worked.
The behavior didn't.

Blippar was shipping rapidly: visual search, face recognition, interactive brand activations, geo-linked content, and early creation tools. Each launch demonstrated what AR could technically do, but not why people would return once the initial surprise wore off.

The issue wasn't usability alone. Most experiences behaved like demonstrations of capability rather than something that naturally belonged in everyday routines.

The roadmap kept expanding while the role of AR in people's lives remained unclear.

The pattern

High downloads. One-time use. No reason to return. The cycle repeated across new feature launches, suggesting the problem wasn't capability. It was the absence of a durable reason to return.

Capability was accelerating faster than behavioral meaning
ADOPTION GAP Technical capability Everyday behavioral fit Early AR Feature expansion

The strategic issue was the widening gap between what the technology could do and what people had a natural reason to do with it repeatedly.

Teenagers gathered during the LightHouse for the Blind research session
During a workshop at LightHouse for the Blind in San Francisco, these teenagers' perspectives became an important part of how our team approached AR.

The teenagers shared how visually impaired people navigate the world, experience technology, and make sense of their surroundings. Their perspectives challenged many of the assumptions that shaped how AR was being designed.

Research focus — finding the signal underneath the effect
WHAT WE LOOKED FOR Moments of return Novelty decay Confusion vs. usefulness Reasons to reopen THE TEST Remove the visual wow. What value still remains? What behavior is still worth designing for?

Even without the visual layer, participants still wanted context, identity, and presence — not information delivery. The signal had survived the removal of the spectacle.

What we learned

Spectacle attracts attention.
Habit requires meaning.

The research revealed something deeper than feature feedback. People weren't trying to decode the world around them. They wanted to leave something of themselves in it.

They weren't struggling to understand AR technically. They were struggling to understand why it belonged in their lives.

The strongest moments weren't necessarily the most visually advanced. They were the ones that felt useful, socially legible, or lightweight enough to repeat.

Design workshop in London with a participant presenting a speculative AR idea

“What if objects could tell you jokes?”

A workshop moment in London where the team explored a different way to present information about an object.
The problem wasn't recognition accuracy
TECHNICAL SUCCESS BEHAVIORAL REALITY Face detection → Used once Interactive overlays → Hard to revisit Rich information layers → Cognitive overload Object recognition → No lasting habit

Capability alone did not create return behavior. The strategic question became what kinds of everyday behavior AR could naturally support.

Novelty is a launch strategy. It's not a retention model.

The strategic shift

From feature expansion
to behavioral fit.

The work shifted away from maximizing AR capability and toward reducing the friction between the medium and everyday behavior.

That reframing exposed a larger organizational tension. One model treated AR as a campaign-driven media layer for brands. Another imagined it as an enduring consumer platform.

One rewarded novelty spikes. The other depended on repeated return. The roadmap had been trying to serve both futures at once.

Two competing visions of the medium
AR AS MEDIA ACTIVATION Campaign-driven Novelty-led One-time interaction Brand visibility AR AS ENDURING UTILITY Repeated behavior Embedded usage Everyday relevance Behavioral retention ↔ The product roadmap was trying to serve both futures at once.

The business tension reflected a deeper category question: was AR a campaign format, a utility layer, or something still undefined?

Process evidence Create Blipp flow — sequencing the creation model
BlippBuilder Create Blipp wireframes showing a creation flow
Wireframes for a Blipp creation flow.
Interaction language Timeline authoring — making AR behavior editable
BlippBuilder animation timeline showing layers, motion effects, and editable behavior timing
Animation timelines, layers, and motion effects made AR creation feel closer to authoring behavior over time.
Consumer App Concept Location-anchored AR · Face Profile · early UGC direction
Face profile — AR identity overlays, location-anchored creation concept
Face recognition often invoked privacy concerns. The design team explored a more playful, expressive direction, which eventually launched through celebrity profiles.

Reflection

Designing without a playbook

Blippar taught me that product strategy in emerging categories cannot rely on capability alone. The harder work is identifying the behavior a new medium can naturally support before the category has settled.

Recognition proved what the technology could see. The more important question was what people had a reason to do with it again. That shift from capability to behavioral meaning became the real design problem.

Looking Back

Designing a new medium
isn't just about the technology.
It's discovering what role it plays
in everyday life.

Carina NgaiProduct Design Lead

David MonteroUX Lead

Lynn SandbergSr. Product Designer

Richard PicotUX Designer

Maurice GroenhartProduct Manager

Ryan SchmaltzEVP, Business Strategy

Satheesh SubramanianVP Engineering

Hareesh RadhakrishnanSenior Software Engineer

Ben MorrowSenior Backend Engineer

LightHouse for the BlindSan Francisco