Extreme Experiences in Virtual Reality

Introduction

Designing this iphone mobile app was a very challenging process. The problem that we were presented with was very challenging, we had to make VR (Virtual Reality) for those with Disabilities. That means we had to find people with disabilities which required us to travel around the city. We had to design for a platform that none of us had designed for before. With this challenge ahead of us we had a long but successful process in designing a mobile app that can be used with Google Cardboard. I can honestly say this app is the one I am most proud of so far. It is clean, simple, and if developed would provide amazing experiences for all people not just those with disabilities.

The Process

1. The Opportunity
2. Research (Brand, Comparative, Technical, User)
3. Synthesis & Ideation (Personas, Feature Ideation, Feature Prioritization)
4. Sketching & Prototyping (POP Prototype, Medium Fidelity Prototype, High-Fidelity Prototype)
5. Final Prototype
6. Results
7. Next Steps
8. Conclusion

The Opportunity

Problem

Some people with disabilities have mental or physical conditions that limit their movement and capabilities. As a result, many disabled persons are unable to experience the thrills and joys of outdoor adventure excursions like scuba-diving, rock climbing, sky-diving, etc.

Opportunity

GoPro’s motto is “Be a Hero”, with intentions to inspire others into action. They believe in passionately pursuing ideas about what’s possible in this world by capturing, sharing, and celebrating memorable moments together. As CEO Nick Woodman says, “The sharing of our collective experiences makes our lives more fun.” GoPro has recently partnered with Google Cardboard to be the main manufacturer of JUMP, a 16-piece 360 Virtual Reality camera that will help propel virtual reality into users’ everyday lives. Between GoPro’s brand personality and virtual reality partnerships, GoPro is perfectly positioned to create alternative experiences for users with disabilities in innovative ways.

GoPro will be creating an app that contains VR videos that will give those that cannot have these extreme experiences an alternative experience.

Research

Brand

Source of Revenue: Selling Cameras.

Key Performance Indicator: How many individual cameras are shipped.

Future: Becoming a media company (Their content and user generated) which could bring in advertisement dollars.

Value Proposition: GoPro sells you on the experience of using the camera. “I think we are entering an age where lifestyle in technology is becoming very important.” — Ben Arnold (Industry Analyst)

Comparative Research

What we Learned:

1. The User Flow is very short to find and play a video on Youtube (As short as two page states and one click).
2. Instagram has a Search layout where you can browse and if you click on search you can search.
3. On Discovery you can favorite videos which saves them.
4. Large Pictures help describe what video you are going to be watching and creates a large a clickable area for you to click on to see the video.

Technical Research into Virtual Reality

Since we are trying to design a mobile iphone app that when you play videos can play them in VR on Google Cardboard we did research into what you can do with VR. This is what we found:

What is VR:

1. 360 all-encompassing video experience
2. Positional content and perspective
3. Can be used via mobile app, other devices (Oculus, HTC, Samsung)
4. Content can be live, recorded, or animated

Tech Challenges:

1. New Territory, the tech is still in the very beginning stages
2. Diminished quality provides unenjoyable experience
3. How to integrate with current technology?
4. Usability Testing within VR mode is difficult
5. Learning curve for new users

Platform Challenges:

1. Distribution of Google Cardboard
2. Who makes content?
3. Price of devices?
4. How to get into people’s homes that aren’t just early adopters?

Plan:

1. Research what is possible with VR by studying the different VR technologies available and testing out different apps that use VR. This should also tell us how to integrate this technology.
2. For Usability Testing we are going to test the app and make a Hype animation that shows what you can do in VR mode and ask for a description of what is happening.
3. For the learning curve, we are going to try to make a simple app.
4. Google Cardboard is less than $30, so if somebody wants to watch a VR video they can.
5. GoPro will make the content.
6. Due to the price of devices we are even more sure we want to make an iphone mobile app so users don’t have to buy a more expensive VR device.

What else we Learned for our mobile iPhone app:

1. This provides the opportunity for a new delightful experience for users.
2. The video quality must be good or it can lead to an unenjoyable experience, so GoPro is a good choice because they make cameras with good video quality.
3. In order to integrate with current technology we decided to make a mobile iphone app that could be put into a Google Cardboard.
4. The ability to move while playing a VR video is important.

User Research

1. Screener: We started with a Screener to find those who had disabilities that we could interview.
2. User Interviews: We interviewed people who responded to our screener (even one person from the Netherlands), we went to and interviewed people from the Center for the Independence of the Disabled, an adaptive baseball game, and friends we knew. Our Goal was to find out how these people were impacted by their disability, their feelings on extreme experiences, and then we would take that information to make an app that they would love!

Our first and very informative User Interview

What we Learned:

1. First, these were very emotional interviews because these were people with real problems and we are very thankful with how open they were about their disability and the impacts it has had on their life.
2. The one concept that got mentioned over and over again was “Normal” Some users who gained their disability later in life coined their current life as the “New Normal”. Others reiterated that even though they had a disability they were “Normal”. In a related concept we also found that those who could keep their disability a secret would because they did not want to be seen as not normal or getting special privlages. Either way, every single user brought up the idea of normal, it was not mentioned to them. We learned that the app could not make them feel different from “Normal”. Even if this app is designed for those with disabilities it could not single out and make those with disabilities feel like they were not “Normal”
3. Most accepted their disability BUT if it was possible to get back to where they were before they would (knee injury that years of Physical Therapy could help bring them back to skiing). We learned from this that those who could get back to extreme experiences would appreciate this app less because they could do the same thing.
4. This app must be social, it should not be isolating. We learned that we need to find ways to encourage people to be social on the app and if possible to bring people together.
5. There is a high amount of effort in doing daily tasks and anything that is an extra task takes even more time. We learned that this app needs to be simple to use so no extra effort is required. Also, this app would be beneficial in that they would not need to leave the house to use it.
6. Every single person is unique and we cannot generalize because each person will have different needs from our product.

Summary of Research

1. GoPro has created a lot of content of athletes doing extreme experiences. All it needs to do is change the camera it is using.
2. The User Flow is very short to find and play a video on Youtube (As short as two page states and one click).
3. Instagram has a Search layout where you can browse and if you click on search you can search.
4. On Discovery you can favorite videos which saves them.
5. Large Pictures help describe what video you are going to be watching and creates a large a clickable area for you to click on to see the video.
6. This app must be created for all people even if it is targeted towards a select group.
7. Must make the experiences enjoyable enough within themselves that even people that can go back to their sports would enjoy this part of virtual reality.
8. This app must have social features.
9. This app must be simple to use so we will have fewer levels of navigation and make text very readable.

Synthesis and Ideation

Personas

We recognized that disabilites are very different when trying to create personas and that the primary differences between them were how permanent their disabilities were and how visible their disabilities were. This impacted their definition of Normal. Therefore, due to the importance of the term Normal and how it impacted a users desire to do extreme sports and try Virtual Reality we decided to base our Personas on the concept of Normalcy.

Persona Ideation

Persona 1: The New Normal (Power User)

Persona 2: It’s Always Been Like This

Persona 3: The Old Normal (Want to experience the Real Thing) but still like cool visual experiences

Key Takeaways from Personas

1. This app must be simple to use so we will have fewer levels of navigation and make text very readable
2. There are different reasons why users would want to use this content (Experience what they can’t experience, delight, help getting over walls)
3. It was really hard to to make Personas as every single person with a disability is very different

Feature Ideation

Lots of Possible Features Discussed

We used the MoSCoW method (Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, Won’t Have) to determine what features were the most important to put in our App

Our MoSCoW method just gave general features and was not very specific. Those were to be fleshed out more during sketching. However, the features we knew we must have:

1. VR Videos
2. Recent List of VR Videos
3. Ability to Browse by Category of Videos
4. Search
5. A way to Save (Favorite) Videos
6. Accessibility Settings
7. Within all this there needs to be quick ways to find and play videos.

Sketching & Prototyping

Low Fidelity Prototype

Sketching:

Method: Design Studio

Goal: To layout the primary features we wanted for our App (The 7 Listed above).

Sketches for the Global Nav, Home Screen, and the VR Dashboard

Findings:

1. Reminder: App is for those who have disabilities
2. We figured Top Navigation so that the thumb may not accidentally hit the bottom (If there was a bottom navigation) and go to wrong page. Also a bottom navigation could mess up when scrolling and take attention of content.
3. Single Module Width when Displaying Videos (Big Pictures and letters for people with eyesight issues)
4. New and Category options on Home Page (So they can see most up-to -date content or easily browse)
5. Onboarding that included Accessibility Settings (Wanted to make the App as friendly as possible for when they first used it)
6. Have a Favorite feature that allows for saving videos for later use

POP Prototype:

Method: Usability Testing

Goal: To quickly validate POP Prototype (icons, navigation, onboarding) before proceeding with higher fidelity prototypes.

The POP Prototype, even with different people working on it and a non-uniform sketching, every user was able to complete every task

Results: 3 out of 3 Users Completed the Onboarding Task, Correctly described what each icon would do, and Correctly described what would they expected to see in each Global Navigation section.

Medium Fidelity Prototype

Method: We each made our own Medium Fidelity Wireframes based off the POP Prototype (No changes were made due to success of POP Prototype). The next day we dot voted for which layout of features best fit the needs of our user.

Results:

Red Boxes highlight some of the changes that we made

Method: Usability Testing

Goal: To further validate Medium Fidelity (icons, navigation, onboarding) Prototype before proceeding with High Fidelity.

Results: 3 out of 3 users were able to Complete the Onboarding Task, Complete the Favoriting Process, Find a video through search, Find and play Video. We also found that we do not need Categories in Home and Search.

Method: Research

Goal: To confirm that we were meeting the needs of our Users and that we are not already doing what an iphone can do.

Results:

1. Move Global Nav to Bottom to be consistent with other iPhone apps
2. Trust the iPhone Accessibility Software and make sure the app is compatible with it
3. Got rid of Accessibility in onboarding
4. Moved sign-up away from onboarding and only require if they favorite
5. Therefore, no more onboarding, a user will go straight to the content.
6. We really just need to create a really good app with large icons and dynamic text

High Fidelity Mock-Ups

Throughout this process we made changes and here are some of the most important changes that we made from Version to Version.

Some of the iterations we made from Version to Version

Method: Turn Medium-Fidelity into High-Fidelity and Animate VR video with suggestions from Research

Goal: To further validate High Fidelity (icons, navigation, onboarding) Prototype before making Final Prototype

Results: 3 out of 3 users were able to complete the favoriting process, find video through search, and could play a video

Final Prototype

The Final Prototype is here: http://invis.io/YB3NUOTG6

Annotated Wireframes

Below are our Annotated Wireframes for this App:

Results

We designed an iphone mobile app that solved the problem that was presented to us.

Business Goals: GoPro is about lifestyle and filming extreme experiences. This Solution allows GoPro to raise it a level by having these videos in Virtual Reality.

User Goals: For those that are unable to participate in these extreme experiences they can now see and hear exactly what it is like to experience these extreme experiences.

The iphone Mobile App: The App is very simple, easy to use and has a quick User Flow to get to Videos. It is possible to get to the video in 2 steps if it is a new video. Open the App, and then click on the video. You only have to put iphone in the Google Cardboard.

Next Steps

Short-Term:

1. More iterations & tests!
2. Feedback when selecting Captions in VR mode
3. Evolve social capacities

Long-Term:

1. Longer-term and more in-depth research to help narrow down scope of who exactly our users are
2. Test with disabled users to get full potential for feedback
3. Explore VR capabilities + other partnerships (underwater, skydiving)

UX Process Challenges

For this specific project it was more difficult to complete user research because we had to go out and find people with disabilities in a very short period time. I will say however that I am very proud of our group and how we posted surveys to social media, reddit, other communities, visited centers, adaptive sports games, etc… all in an effort to find and interview our users.

Making Personas was also very difficult because it is hard to take Hundreds of Millions of people with varying disabilities and make three overarching archetypes that represent them well enough to guide our designs. However, we believe we found some behavior patterns which led to personas and told us that there is a reason why everybody would use this app and that we just needed to design an app that has the content in an easily accessible format.

Figuring out how to represent control functions in VR was difficult. From what the controls are, to how to activate them, to most importantly, how to show this to a developer. Much discussion went into the controls and how to activate them and we decided that looking down being a control function (so you don’t have to take the Cardboard off), then just by looking right or left to change the options, and clicking the magnet to change something that we found a way that limited the amount of steps necessary to change options in the app. How to represent that was challenging but by making a Hype prototype we are able to show the developer the animations necessary for this process to work.

Being able to overcome these challenges and make an app with limited navigation, immediate access to VR videos, control functions in VR was an amazing journey and I am happy to say I believe we made an app that is clean, usable, and follows the HIG.

Conclusion

This work required the use of all of the tools I have learned so far (Google (docs, sheets, forms, drive), Sketch, Omnigraffle, POP, InVision, Hype, and the ability to go out and interview people with amazing life stories). This project was an amazing opportunity to put all of these tools together and make a product that all of us are truly proud of.

What I found most surprising was the various different ways that people dealt with disabilities (particularly because they can be so different) which for me mirrors the different ways people go through life. It is amazing to me the way that trauma can shape and in many ways strengthen people.

Finally, this was an important project for me as I look toward the future because I want to learn how I can serve all people and design apps that truly improve the lives of people. I will remember these interviews for the rest of my life and my hope is to find new ways to serve those I interviewed and others as a UX designer.