VR Prototype: How bookmarks are going to look in VR?
Last year right before the holidays we started working on a new UX prototype for VR — how browser bookmarks would work in VR. I already talked about how we imagine 2D websites to transform into VR websites. The next step is to look into core browser functionalities and experiment to find the best implementations for VR.
How do users use bookmarks?
We did a research and dozens of user interviews to better understand why and how users use bookmarks. What we found is that there are two distinct reasons for which users use bookmarks: to create shortcuts and to save information for later references.
Shortcut to the most used websites
In the first case, users bookmark websites used on a daily basis to make accessing them easier. Most often, these links are saved in the bookmarks bar or on the browser launch page to make accessing them just a click away.
Save for later
The second usage of bookmarks is to save websites containing relevant information for a later use. In this case, the types of users vastly ranges — from “regulars” who save all links in a single folder to “power users” who use dozens of folders or external tools such as Evernote or Pocket to organize their content. An important pattern that came up during the interviews was that power users are looking to get a full control over the process — they want to be able to label, rename or change the icons of the bookmarks, while regular users need only the basic functionality of saving a link.
As I mentioned our research covered topics such as renaming bookmarks, how users search among their bookmarks, etc. but we need more data to conclusively distinguish between definite usability patterns. That is why we decided to focus on the two main usages of bookmarks while designing the VR bookmarks prototype.
Another important trend we took into consideration is that users use the browser URL bar as a search engine. They just type in the first few symbols of a website name and expect for the relevant website to appear. In VR typing is still quite of a pain, so until voice recognition or another typing method is introduced, we assume that users would avoid typing in VR. An easy way to avoid typing the name of a website is to create a shortcut in the form of a bookmark. Thus, our assumption is that users would be saving more bookmarks in VR than on a PC / mobile meaning they would need an easy way to navigate among them.
Prototyping phase
Our UX team works in one-week sprints, the fast pace allows us to easily change the trajectory of an experiment if we bump into a usability problem. Thus, we decided to split the VR bookmarks prototype into several stages. The first one was to design how the shortcut bookmarks would work. This seemed to be the easier task as in this case, the behavior of most of the users was identical. Still, VR added an extra level of complexity and limitations. For example, we envision that the VR websites would be 360-degree experiences. Thus, to simulate a similar user experience to a 2D browser several options could work:
- The user could get out of the 360 websites into the browser home and click on a new bookmark — still this is not an optimal flow as traveling in between websites would be slow.
- The second option is for the user to be able to call a bookmarks menu within 360 websites — this case is similar to the way Oculus menu works but still requires one more click than a regular browser.
- The third option is for the user to carry the most used bookmarks with himself in the form of a physical object so at any point he can click/touch a bookmark.
We decided to test first the third option. As you can see in the picture we designed the most used bookmarks as bubbles attached to the user’s left hand. I can’t wait to share more about the results and the feedback we got after testing with users. I will do it in my next blog post though, stay tuned!
View all posts by billyvacheva
Published January 9, 2018January 9, 2018
Originally published at productmanageronthego.wordpress.com on January 9, 2018.
