User Experience Design & VR

Published in

BravoVictorNovember

5 min readApr 4, 2019

Last week I attended a week-long accelerated course on User Experience (UX) Design at General Assembly, instructed by Grant Maskell. This topic is huuuge, and after 3 years of being a Virtual Reality (VR) Experience Developer it was time to get some formal training on UX design. This post is about my week and what I learnt in a nutshell.

How it All Began

If you’ve been following our VR development journey since 2016, you’ll know that in our early days, the very first time we tested our Marrickville Library VR demo on real users — it was a flop. We thought we had created a great VR experience with a photorealistic environment, spatial audio, and teleportation to navigate around… what could possibly go wrong? It wasn’t until after multiple rounds of user testing that it finally became a refined and engaging VR experience that people were choosing to stay in for longer than 30 seconds.

Fast forward to now and one of our goals is (and has always been) to create a seamless user experience in all of our VR projects. As we look to work on new VR projects, it felt only right for someone on the team to have some formal training on User Experience Design.

The Course

The week was all about the hands on process of creating a strong user experience for the end user. The days were split between learning lots of interesting UX concepts and project work, with the main output being a website or an app. Here’s the process:

The first half of the process was new to me and I found it super valuable. It involved researching through user interviews (literally on the first day) as we tried to define the real problem that we’re trying to solve i.e. ‘making the right thing’.

The second half of the process (luckily) validated how we currently do things here— develop a prototype, user test, observe, ask questions, repeat i.e. ‘making the thing right’. It has worked really well for us in refining our VR experiences to make them easier to use.

The course overall was very end user focused — it’s not about what I want, it’s about what the end user wants. This seems like common sense but it’s easy to forget when you’re deep in a project.

Key Takeaways From the Process

Make Decisions Based on Evidence (Discover/Define)

After doing user interviews we needed to synthesise our research to find trends and insights as to what our users were really telling us. We did this through affinity mapping, which involved us using a whole lot of post-it notes and a sharpie, sticking them all up on a wall, then stepping back and questioning everything on the post-it notes until something clicked.

Another great method I learnt was to ask the 5 whys. Any decisions we make need to have evidence to back them up. This prevents any assumptions and biases we might be working with from clouding our judgement.

For example, a classmate originally wanted to create an app which organises lots of information for when you’re planning a trip. After interviewing users, she realised that most people always asked for recommendations through friends/family before Google, because the process of planning travel itineraries can be so overwhelming. So the real problem she wanted to solve was: how could she make trip planning less overwhelming/stressful in the beginning? Her solution incorporated social media, allowing the user to connect their Facebook/Instagram accounts so the user can see honest reviews by their friends about potential places they want to go, instead of digging through a bunch of reviews by strangers.

Ideate Through Sketches (Develop)

The idea is to sketch at least 8 different solutions to the defined problem. Chances are, the best idea isn’t even in the top row, or the potential solution is a combination of multiple sketches.

For 3 days a classmate had thought that she had the solution in her head all along, until she did this exercise and realised that sketch #10 was her best one. A quote from her:

“This shit actually works!”

Moving Forward

So how does this all tie in with VR development? Having completely stumbled into UX without meaning to with our VR work, there were definitely techniques from the course that we can adopt to make our VR development process better:

Do more in the Discover phase — find out what the end user really wants through user interviews (if possible). This is a way for us to find what’s valuable to them and design the VR experience accordingly.
Ask users how they would interact with/do something in VR instead of us assuming and test the results. This could potentially save us a lot of time and allow us to explore more possibilities, particularly with new interactions that we haven’t worked with before.
When we’re user testing and we find a consistent problem — ask the 5 whys to get to the root of the problem quickly. This way we can user test a potential solution in the next round.
User test as early as possible and as often as possible. We already user test quite often but probably not early enough, so don’t be afraid if someone from the VR team approaches you for a test! This is to ensure that we have a seamless VR experience that is easy to use.

Hopefully by integrating these methods we can create valuable VR experiences for our clients, whilst being time efficient and end user focused.