Nimble Creativity: Design & Technology in the Same Room
How Handsome pairs designers and technologists for fast-paced VR innovation.
Dell recently approached Handsome to work on a Virtual Reality experience they will premiere at this year’s SXSW Technology conference. Knowing that our work on this project will be seen by thousands of attendees, it’s vital that we create a high quality, beautiful, accessible, and interesting experience. The challenges to reaching that goal are that Dell’s experience with VR in the past hasn’t been wholly positive, we have a new team doing the work, and we have a short timeline from conception to delivery. Thus, we’ve brought our technical staff and designers into very tight collaboration, allowing us to rapidly iterate on and explore novel ideas like tracking physical objects, building props, and building heat lamps and rumble motors into the environment that never would have come up if either had been working alone.
A common approach to delivering a project of this sort would be doing all the necessary steps in sequential order — what is often called a “waterfall” approach:
This sequential approach has a couple of things going for it: everyone’s responsibilities are clear, it’s quite efficient for well-understood problems, and it’s easy to manage.
But this way of doing things has several serious drawbacks — some of them specific to our situation and some universal:
- It doesn’t support experimentation and exploration, which is vital when we’re not yet sure what the final product should look like.
- A sequential “throw it over the wall” approach encourages a high level of responsibility for one’s own step in the flow, but not for the project’s overall progress and success.
- While efficiency tends to be high, the start-to-finish timeline is long, and a hitch in one area causes all subsequent steps to be delayed.
- In our case, we simply don’t have the time to do things sequentially and still hit the deadline for SXSW.
Since VR is a new medium where the norms aren’t well-established, it’s vital that we have opportunities to try out different approaches, demonstrate prototypes to the client, and decide together what the best approach to communicating our client’s message will be. Accordingly, we adopted a strategy where the whole team was engaged throughout the project; while we each retained an area of responsibility, we execute on our individual tasks in tight coordination with the rest of the team. When a requirement wasn’t yet clear, we’d adjust our work schedule to focus on the best-defined tasks, and prioritize getting clarity on the others.
For example, one portion of the experience requires the user to guide a recycled computer to a new home. We originally conceived of this as a virtual version of the classic wooden ball maze game:
As we experimented with this idea, it became clear that while the core idea was sound, making the controls feel natural would be a challenge. Current VR technology, while good at sight and hearing, doesn’t do much with touch. Being able to feel the controls is an especially important part of navigating one of these mazes.
Accordingly, we decided to try different approaches: our developer implemented a one-handed grab-and-tilt scheme and showed it to the designers. The designers suggested a similar approach, but two-handed, as that would be a more natural gesture for someone manipulating a good-sized object. Then our developer mentioned that, in addition to the standard controllers, Vive makes a Tracker — a hockey puck sized device that can be attached to real-world objects to allow the system to track them and show them in VR space. We grabbed a tray from the break room, plunked down a Tracker on it, and had a working physical object interaction proof-of-concept to experiment within a few hours. The designers mentioned that not being able to see one’s hands was a bit off-putting, so we brainstormed on various ways to deal with that issue. Our project manager brought in the client stakeholder to take a look at the physical object approach and weigh in with her input.
The important thing to note here is that through each step of the project, every discipline works closely with all of the others involved. The designer doesn’t notice the same things the developer does. The client product owner brings different insights than the project manager. But every one of those people had important input that has helped us to arrive at a better solution to the maze problem, and each carried a sense of responsibility for coming up with the best solution. (Which one did we choose? Come by SXSW to find out!)
Another challenge we faced was working to define the placement of several objects within our virtual experience. We started by gathering feedback after each round of development but quickly decided that was too slow and frustrating. Instead, our developer moved objects in real-time as a designer called out instructions while viewing the scene in a VR headset. This massively improved our efficiency. But even that was more cumbersome than we would have liked, so our developer built tools that allowed the designer to adjust the position of objects in the virtual space directly. Ultimately we cut that design feedback loop to a few seconds, rather than a day.
This interdisciplinary approach is a key part of our work style at Handsome. Study after study has demonstrated that work quality improves with the diversity of the team doing that work. We believe that applies not only to ethnographic characteristics but also to professional skill sets. Having people who think dramatically differently working together on a problem results in better, more creative solutions. That’s why we have our customers, designers, and developers all work closely together.
Sequential work is a good choice for projects that are well understood. But when you’re exploring and learning new things, engage the whole team. You’ll be better able to address the unforeseen and come up with stronger ideas than any one person would be able to individually.
Written by Sean McMains, Director of Technology Implementation at Handsome.
