Old-School Design for New-School Experiences (Also Alpacas)
Caryn Vainio is currently the Lead UX designer at VREAL, a company that turns VR games into shared experiences. Her career started in the video game industry, where she worked on titles including Monday Night Combat, Demigod, and Space Siege. She has two kids, one husband, and four alpacas. Our designer, Amanda, got to speak with Caryn about her experience designing for a relatively new medium, the challenges she’s faced along the way, and of course, her alpacas.
Generally, VR is thought of as a solitary experience. Are there any unexpected challenges you’ve had to overcome in making it more social?
VR can actually be a fun social experience at its core. There are already apps out there, like Facebook Spaces, that let you and your friends put on headsets and jump into a shared virtual space. In these types of environments, you each have an avatar, and you can interact with each other in the space.
Based on what we’re trying to do though, which is game streaming, we have some really unique challenges. In the traditional, non-VR, game-streaming world, we have this notion of the game-player broadcasting their game footage on a 2D screen. So, as a game-watcher, I’m able to sit at my computer and type text to them while they play. The interesting thing about VR is you don’t have that…So, we need to be able to design a similar social experience, but without a keyboard. We also need to make it possible for the streamer and their audience to interact in a smooth way without it overshadowing the streamer’s own game play. A similar experience would be if you had people physically in a room and somebody was trying to play a game and talk to you at the same time. We need to figure out how to manage that well for both the streamer and the audience. It’s a really interesting challenge.
Have you come up with any good solutions?
We’re in the very, very early stages of designing ways to allow people to communicate with a streamer. Since you can’t do text, one of the ways we’re thinking, is through emojis. So if the streamer says something funny, I can show them a laughing face, for example. Another thing we’re considering is using some sort of controlled, limited way of incorporating voice. We’re going to have try these things, though. We’ll have to prototype them — and probably fail the first time out of the gate — and just keep iterating until we get them right.
I saw that your talk at UX Week touches on the two schools of thought in VR: 1. using traditional design that people recognize from the world of 2D; and 2. mimicking reality in three dimensions as much as possible. What are your thoughts on the topic?
It seems like those are two very divergent roads that I’ve seen. When it comes to designing user interfaces and user experiences within VR, people tend to either want to play it really, really safe and use 2D stuff because it’s familiar, or they try to make everything mimic reality exactly. To me, there is a middle ground. Neither of those roads is really 100% the best way to go. It also really depends on what you’re building in VR, of course, so there’s no one true path.
There’s this notion that VR is the wild west and you can sort of do whatever you want. Yes, you want to think very much outside of the box, and you obviously don’t want to be constrained and apply old-school thinking to new-school tech, but there are still good, solid design principles that you can build on to make good user experiences, and those things still apply. That’s sort of the thrust of my talk.
There are still good, solid design principles that you can build on to make good user experiences, and those things still apply.
The field of VR is relatively new and there aren’t many set-in-stone design patterns. How do you go about approaching this uncharted territory?
There are two things that my design thinking coalesces around when it comes to VR. One of them is, surprisingly, ergonomics. I have to think about whether an experience is physically comfortable. A good example is an app that I worked on a long time ago that required you to look down quite a bit — almost like you were looking down at a table. We found, through our own internal testing, that that’s extremely uncomfortable. VR headsets — at least most of the PC-driven ones — are not light, so constantly having to bend your head down actually makes your neck start to hurt.
The second thing is drawing inspiration from everyday experience design principles, not just those that are tied to interfaces. In the real world, for example, I need to receive some kind of feedback that shows that my action was successful, or that I am reaching for the right thing, or that the thing that I think is interactive really is interactive…Those are design principles that transcend the technology.
Here’s a good example: In VR, we have a tendency to want to make things very skeuomorphic and diegetic, so they’re not only embedded in the world, but they also look like an object you would use in the real world. The good thing about this is objects blend in with the world seamlessly. The drawback, however, is that not everything in VR is interactive like in the real world. How is the user going to know that the filing cabinet over there in the corner is something that they need to open to get something out of it? We always want the user to know which object they’re supposed to be interacting with — we don’t want to make them hunt for it. Design principles like signifiers, affordances, and user feedback, are still really important in VR.
One last thing, what’s this I hear about you having alpacas and making your own fleece?
(Laughs) I always love to talk about my alpacas. I have a very small herd…I’m a little hobbyist alpaca rancher. I have four of them — they are my fiber herd.
I’ve been a fiber artist for about 20 years now. Before that, I started off as a knitter. Eventually I began to learn to spin my own yarn because I thought it was interesting. It was one of those things where when I was a knitter, people told me, ‘The next thing you’re going to want to do is spin your own yarn’, and I said, ‘Well, no, who would do that?’ And then somebody showed me, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is amazing.’ Then, when I started spinning my own yarn, my friends and family said to me, ‘The next thing you’re going to do is process your own fleece,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s dumb, who would ever do that?’ Then, next thing you know, I’m processing my own fleece. And then of course — I think you see where this is going — they told me, ‘The next thing you’ll want to do is own the animals.’ And now, here we are…My husband and I bought our alpacas about 8 years ago. Every year we shear their fleece, and I use their fleece to make my own handspun yarn.
Is that thing true about their spit? Like with camels?
Yeah, so they’re related to camels and llamas. They’re cousins. Alpacas are a bit more sweet-natured though — they tend to spit at each other instead of people, but if you’re unlucky enough to be out there when they decide to have a fight, it’s the worst smelling thing in the world. It’s just everything from their stomach; you know, everything regurgitated up. Yeah, I’d run if another alpaca was about to spit that at me…
See Caryn’s talk Bridging Two Worlds: Adapting to VR Design at UX Week on Aug. 29 in San Francisco. Tickets available until Monday, Aug. 28.
