Early this year, I was the UX designer for TripIt’s Google Glass app. The Glass team had contacted us and asked us to be one of the first third-party app developers for the new wearable device. This was an amazing privilege, and a challenge for me especially, because Glass isn’t just any wearable device: it’s the first of its kind that’s gotten this kind of publicity, and it comes with its own philosophy of what wearable tech and augmented reality should (or shouldn’t) be. We were designing not only for our use cases, but for Google’s strict requirements on (for example) what transit information is relevant to Glass users or what actions are important enough to be given a built-in voice command. Design was further complicated by the fact that we had no easily-accessible pool of Glass users to test our designs on. Finally, I had to come up with a way of prototyping augmented reality apps, for which context is as necessary as what’s being shown on the screen.

To help you understand how our app fits in with the rest of the Glass platform, I made this prezi:

Here’s a working example of how one might prototype a Glass app (the buttons “wake up” and “ok glass” correspond to actions the user would take while wearing the device — tilting their head up to wake the device, and saying the words “ok glass” to see a menu of available commands). Feel free to play around with it.

Finally, here’s an example of what it looks like to view your next-upcoming plan in TripIt for Glass. You can tilt your head up or down to see one plan in the past or future.

All in all, despite the heavy revisions we went through, I think it came out all right. If you have Glass, you can download it from the glassware store and try it out for yourself (note: you have to be logged into a google account for this page to load at all).