Whiteboard Line Maker
This client had come to me with a semi-working prototype that they wanted to improve upon. My task was to make this product more ergonomic, comfortable for the user, and more precise.
The goal of this product is to create perfectly spaced lines for elementary school teachers to be able to teach letter spacing, spelling, tall letters, and tailed letters. Currently, teachers just use a yard stick and its a multi-step process to create this stencil. The dot maker product will create both top and bottom lines, as well as the dotted middle line in one motion.
Problem solving
Some challenges that I faced during the process, were the the center dash line had too powerful of a spring so would bounce twice. We solved this by hand bending springs of different strengths and testing each one out until the dash was a smooth bounce.
Getting the mechanical wheel to grip to the whiteboard was tricky- the product kept sliding around the whiteboard so we added rubber o-rings to grooves in the wheel, which solved the problem.
We ran into an issue with the plastic housing scratching against the whiteboard - so we added a piece of felt, and this solved that issue, along with also making the entire bottom surface for parallel to the board, which helped the performance drastically.