Immersive Interview with Joe Connolly
Joe is a co-founder of Sketchbox. It’s the first design tool crafted for augmented and virtual reality.
I noticed that you made few interviews with people from the VR field. They are pretty interesting.
Yeah, thanks. I found there were lots of people writing about AR & VR, but most of the content was thin, or just hype. So I’ve been interviewing people who are doing awesome things in VR & AR that I think the entire community can learn from. I’m always surprised how much I learn every time I do an interview.
I know that you are a co-founder of Sketchbox, design tool for AR/VR. I have tried it, and it looks impressive. Can you explain more what it is?
Sketchbox is a design and prototyping tool for AR & VR. Product managers and designers use it to quickly create rough prototypes of their ideas without writing code, and get feedback. If you were designing a VR/AR app, you need to figure out the menus look and feel, you need to figure out what the user flow is and you need to design environments. You can use Sketchbox to do all of that — and easily get feedback from your team. Think InVision for AR/VR.
I noticed that you could change a position of a camera from scene to scene. Do you have features that allow a user to animate object inside a scene?
We’re not really focused on creating, finished, animated scenes. If you think about web and mobile development, there are two very distinct phases. In the first phase you have product managers and designers that use tools like InVision and Sketch to build interactive prototypes. They do user testing with those prototypes, and when the prototype has been approved their dev team starts building it. We have really good development tools for AR & VR — Unity and Unreal and getting better every day. There’s a need for really good design and prototyping tools that product managers and designers can use.
Got it. So from this perspective tool like Tvori is closer to After Effects. You can create enhanced animations using it, but you would never use After Effects for initial prototyping.
That’s one way to look at it. Teams use Sketchbox in the design process and once they have the design they like, they export it from Sketchbox and give it to their development team. And the development team can start layering code on top of it.
There are a lot of different tools for making art in VR, like Tilt Brush and Quill for example. Don’t you think that this area is overcrowded already? Or do you think that there will be more potential in the future?
There are a lot of incredible VR creative tools, Tilt Brush is amazing. Quill is incredible, especially the latest release. Oculus Medium is ridiculously cool for creating 3d meshes. Although they might look similar on the surface, they’re very different and have been built for very different uses. They all want artists to unlock their potential in 3D. The tools for creating art in VR are still relatively young and I still think there’s room for more, wether that’s something like AnimVR or something from Adobe.
It makes so much sense. I hope that in the future we will get more designers from different fields, and we’ll start to use various tools for different purposes.
How did you come up with an idea to make Sketchbox?
My co-founder, Peter Le Bek (he’s absolutely brilliant and has more a less built everything that is Sketchbox) and I were playing around with VR on evenings and weekends. We would have an idea for VR application. We would sketch it out on a paper. And after spending a few weeks building a prototype we’d put on a headset and realize that it just didn’t work. The idea we had didn’t translate at all from two-dimensional space into three dimensions. And after the same thing happened a few times, we we actually said: “Why don’t we have a design tool that will let us prototype our ideas without building it?” And that was the start of Sketchbox.
Have you got a lot of users? What is your current growth?
We have users from the largest AR & VR teams today, including Oculus, Microsoft, EON Reality and others.
It sounds promising.
I like so much your controllers. From the first second, I realized that making them transparent is the fantastic solution. It makes them more accurate and less distractive.
Vector drawing tool is also amazing. Hold plane using a left controller and draw with a right controller without using trigger is very intuitive. As your co-founder is a more technical person, who is working on the design of the app?
We both collaborate on design and what we call ‘Product’ but that particular interaction was designed and created entirely by Peter. We were actually the first team to launch anything like it, and now you’re seeing the same interaction replicated in a few other tools.
Are you more on a marketing side?
Peter and I worked together for quite a few years on another company where he was CTO, and I was Director of Product. So my main focus right now is on product and marketing.
Having settled team is good. So you didn’t have any prior experience in design?
At our previous company, Peter and I both spent a lot of my time doing design.
Are you only the team of two?
We are currently a team of four, Peter myself, and two other fantastic developers.
What is your usual workflow? For example, you want to add a new feature. Do you make some sketches in Sketchbox?
Yeah. Either we have an idea for a feature, or we get an idea from one of our users. Usually we get ideas from our users. Then we use Sketchbox to create prototypes for a few different possible implementations of the feature. Then we discuss what solutions we think are best, weighing ease of use, build time and etc. After we’ve settled on, what we think is the best solution, we take it back to our users. We actually show them the Sketchbox prototype and ask them “is this what you want? Will this solve your problem?”. And then we can make changes and start building.
It’s a very efficient user-centered approach.
Yeah, we’re really trying to avoid building things that people don’t want.
It’s great that you have a single tool for all designs. Because after having a chat with other people I discovered that they are making different diagrams, flowcharts, tons of sketches, sometimes prototypes in Unity or short videos in After Effects. As usual, it’s such a messy process, and it’s incredible to have the single tool for the whole workflow.
Occasionally, for some features that have a 2D component, like a menu, we’ll use something like Sketch. After making rough prototypes with Sketchbox and figuring out how it’s going to work in VR, we’ll bring an image that we created with Sketch into Sketchbox so we know how it will really look.
How YCombinator affected you and your product?
YCombinator was the incredible experience for both of us. It was very intense. We worked non-stop from the day we were accepted to demo day. The other people we met at YC were world class and our group partners Michael Seibel and Gustaf Alströmer were just phenomenal.
Did it change your plans for the future of the application?
I think that we had similar ideas before going to YCombinator. It’s going to sound cliche, but going through YCombinator made us talk to so many more users and really focus on building what they want.
What do you think are the most required skills for people that want to start designing for AR and VR?
It depends on your role, but ideally you have a few different skill sets. You have a solid understanding of UX principles so you can design applications that are easy to use. You should understand code and how the game engines work so you know about how long it will take to build what you’re designing. And being familiar with 3D modelling tools is also great — you don’t need to be a tech artist, but you need to understand how models are created.
It sounds like a lot to understand, and it is, but it’s easy to get started. Honestly, if I wanted to start designing for AR/VR I’d start by using Sketchbox to explore my ideas.
Right. Skills of understanding dimensions are so required here. It’s not so easy to switch from 2d design to environmental design.
Yeah, it’s totally new skillset. A lot of people that are coming into VR had been working in the video game industry. They’ve been designing environments, and working with 3D models for years. And the same skills are applicable to VR and AR.
Experience of building games can be even more helpful in VR than any graphic design skills.
Yep, they are familiar with tools. They know how game engines like Unity and Unreal work and they’ve spent time working with 3D models.
Interesting. Is there anything else that you want to talk about?
Over the last year and a half the VR hardware hasn’t changed, but the experiences are getting a lot better. You’ve seen it with Brass Tactics, Beat Saber and others. Designers are getting better at understanding the medium and I’m excited to see what they’re creating a year from now.
I noticed the same from the design perspective. There wasn’t good UX approaches one and a half a year ago. Right now we have more solid best practices. People still have to experiment a lot, but now we have at least ground to start those experiments. I hope that soon it’ll get even more solid. You are in great position with SketchBox to help designers to build better VR experiences and AR in future.
Thanks.
Good luck with your app, and thank you for your time!
This story is part of series Immersive Interviews. If you are also VR/AR designer, and you have what to say (I’m sure that you have) drop me a line on email or Twitter. Check out the previous interview from this series:
