Enterprise VR: Information Architecture
In the last post, I mentioned that synthetic 3D geometry can be used to make complex systems tangible and understandable. Here, the term “Information Architecture” gets a new and quite literal meaning.
It usually describes navigational structures spanning multiple pages or sub-page elements in conventional UIs. The relative arrangement within a page forms an information hierarchy.
In a well-designed 3D work environment, navigation simply means locomotion within a single environment, and information hierarchy is a function of the user’s current location and angle of view.
The environment, itself, can be shaped at different scales:
Cockpit Scale
In contrast to larger scale environments, a cockpit-like work place is designed for an operator who is fixed in one location. Such a setup is useful for work activities that are focused on a narrow set of content.
The work content needs to be displayed in one or two virtual panels hovering directly in front of the user, so that they can use most of the physical display’s pixels while the user looks straight ahead. It is tempting to make the hovering display panes semi-transparent, but that adds a lot of visual noise. Their opacity should be at least 90%.
Screen real estate available through simple head turning can be used for things that the user needs closely at hand. In the setup shown in the sketch above, there is a desk with a tilted surface that provides frequently used tools or commands in the lower field of view. The upper field of view is used to display alerts.
A very useful feature is the ability to stash multiple display panels (e.g. representing different data sets or activities) on the right side, so that they can be quickly brought back to focus or combined with the current focus later. By scaling them down, the user can easily keep track of about 10 such panels.
On the left side, there is an area for retrieving more content when needed. Although it is represented by a panel in the sketch, it could also be a cabinet with labeled drawers or something more futuristic depending on the preferred metaphor.
Of course, the ideal layout will depend on the kind of activity to support. Still it always makes sense to use most of the central field of view for the work focus, and keep the most frequently needed things close to the center.
Room Scale
As mentioned in the previous posts, a 3D work environment is particularly useful when the user needs to keep track of multiple things while working (a typical situation in a NOC). If we put the “work cockpit” in the context of a larger room, we can place additional elements for tracking in the background.
Following the rule that proximity corresponds to relevance (relative to the user’s work place and activity respectively) results in an intuitive information hierarchy due to the laws of perspective. It is important that the content displayed in the background is, itself, designed with a clear information hierarchy, so that the gist can be grasped from a greater distance while the details can be inspected from close up.
Also important in room scale (and larger) environments are structuring elements such as architectural details, plants or decorations, which don’t carry information themselves, but are vital for the user’s orientation in space. It is important that the different areas in the virtual space have individual features. The choice of non-functional elements and the backdrop can also have a big impact on the atmosphere and the user’s mood.
Large Scale Environments
The setup discussed so far is useful for focused work; however the full potential of 3D/VR environments only unfolds at a larger scale: When spatial representations help us to make sense of complex system, organizational, project, or process structures. Think of projects with several hundred people in more than a dozen teams, thousands of topics and work packages to keep track of.
The Role of Location
A characteristic of complex systems is that they can be looked upon from different (figurative) angles of view. And in order to make complexity manageable, we usually build separate user interfaces for each angle of view, and within these we usually have pages that show us either a summary of a large number of entities (as aggregated numbers and simple charts) or very few entities at a high level of detail (tables). The disconnectedness of all these different representations makes us a bit like the blind men examining the elephant: Each page lets us peek at a little piece of the thing, but it is very hard to form a mental picture of the whole.
A well-designed large-scale spatial representation can fix this problem: In a single, continuous model, the different angles of view correspond to different locations, or points of view. They are no longer separate, but logically embedded into a bigger context which is always visible as a whole.
In this space, there are locations where specific types of entities “live” and there are locations for specific activities. The entities are represented by geometric objects. In the sketch below, for example, hosts are represented by vertical blocks arranged by the cluster they belong to:
Likewise, there can be locations dedicated to activities: For tracking the system status, we can provide a control tower hovering directly above all the clusters. The user can work in the control room and look down on the whole landscape or, when necessary, beam themselves down to one of the clusters to inspect the hosts from close up (i.e. look at their workloads, connectivity etc.). The information hierarchy, expressed by relative size of things, is dependent on the user’s location, and, hence, focus of interest.
In order to manage the lifecycle of the software running on the cluster, the user would work somewhere more distant, hovering over a representation of software packages and features.
Structuring Large Spaces
The biggest asset of immersive 3D representations is the abundance of space. We can afford vast quantities of negative (empty) space, which can be used in two ways: To separate things (such as different clusters in the sketch above) and to open lines of sight.
Lines of sight are the most crucial element of design since they determine what content is visible for every location and angle of view. Open spaces in the horizontal structure reveal certain distant content from a particular position, and solid walls can hide information that is irrelevant from that point of view. Windows and portals can be used to focus by constraining the line of sight.
But the vertical dimension also provides plenty of possibilities. For example, the occlusion of important content can be avoided by providing elevated points of view, by vertically staggering content, and by providing beacons that summarize the information from their surroundings and are visible from long distances.
So, the topography of content is ideally such that things of high importance are higher up, where they are visible from all directions, and things of local importance are placed at lower altitudes. Also, as a consequence of the fact that relatedness translates into proximity, content that is related to many things will end up close to the center, whereas less connected content will be placed in the periphery.
Similarly, the places for activities that require an overview over a bigger picture will be higher up and activities that require narrow focus will take place down in the alleys.
Beyond the placing of content, the overall topography (in the sense of vertical structure) also plays an important role in providing landmarks for better orientation. A mountain at one end of the map and a sea on the other will make sure the user always has certainty about their current angle of view. Of course, architectural landmarks, such as towers, arcs, and bridges, help, too.
Another powerful tool for the structuring of large spaces is lighting, since our attention is naturally drawn to brighter spots. The direction of sunlight and additional light sources can point us to more relevant content. This can even be dynamic, i.e. when the user focuses on a particular entity, directly related entities can light up (even if they are far away) while unrelated entities get darker.
Encoding Information
While the structuring of the environment has a big impact on the information architecture, it is purely syntactic, in a manner of speaking. The semantics, which are crucial for our ability to interpret what we see, depend on how we encode information.
The most important part of this is the choice of metaphors, which will be the topic of the next post. Other things to keep in mind are:
The shape of things needs to be expressive. Don’t be afraid of using detailed geometry with many features. Our brains are incredibly efficient at interpreting geometry and taking cues from even subtle differences. On the other hand, we can’t do much with large quantities of essentially the same objects (say, boxes). Avoid “sameness”.
The principle of proportional ink translates into proportional volume. Wherever possible, reflect the main quantity related to an entity in its size.
A rather inconvenient trait of complex systems is that they are never purely hierarchical, but rather interconnected along multiple dimensions. Often, the attempt is made to visualize them by means of graph visualizations (consisting of discs and connecting lines), which quickly degenerate into meaningless, undifferentiated, balls of wool with increasing number of nodes.
Reflecting these interconnections in a spatial information architecture without covering everything in spider webs requires the same entities to be represented at multiple places, close to the connected entities. There will usually be one place where each type of entity will be “at home”. Because virtual spaces allow us to use magic wherever we want, we can find creative ways of conveying to the user where else an entity they are looking at appears on the map, (making the rest of the world transparent, opening portals…).
With all the tools described in this post, large-scale spatial representations are certainly by far the best shot we have to make complex systems understandable and manageable.
