Project Overview

Magic UX is a new smartphone interface inspired by the physical world. It uses your view of the real world to help you navigate computer generated content in the digital world. It's a practical, subtle use of augmented reality.

Organisation

Special Projects

Team

Special Projects is a design and invention consultancy founded by creative director and industrial designer Clara Gaggero Westaway and experience designer and magician Adrian Westaway.

Project Brief

Smartphones and small screens have made their way into our everyday lives, transforming the way we communicate and work. Despite many benefits over traditional analogue tools, some digital interactions are actually more complex and frustrating than their physical equivalents.

The moment when you move between apps, copying text from a webpage into an email, for example, is more complex on a small screen than it would be in the physical world, interrupting flow and increasing the cognitive load of a simple task.

We discovered that this was a problem many people experienced across all apps - it didn’t matter if you were writing a report for work or booking a holiday. The problem lived in the space between the apps, a sort of no man's land.

This doesn’t happen when you work at your desk. We found that people often lay out their work tools, such as notepads, pens, and reports in specific arrangements in front of them, allowing them to move between tasks by simply shifting their gaze and moving their hands.

Inspired and intrigued by these natural and fluid interactions we have with the physical world, we became interested in ways of recreating them in the digital space.