Best Practices for Building Spatial Solutions — Part 2

Software development practices for spatial solution are growing, we are sharing our experience and best practices for building spatial solutions using eXtended Reality (XR)

< Part 1: XR Product Definition || Part 3: XR development and testing >

eXtending the Reality by Spatial Collaboration

Best practices of User Experience Design

The “Reality” is what we believe, and we believe what we see, hear and sense. So “Extended Reality (XR)” is about extending or changing the belief. Once the user gets immersed in the new digital environment, they also expect to interact with digital objects presented to them in the same/similar ways as they interact with real objects in the physical world.

• Minor glitch in AR applications can break the immersive experience and users may not believe in the virtual objects. It is more important to keep the user engaged all the time.
• AR Applications need great onboarding — As AR is a new technology, most of the first time users don’t know what to expect. They are only familiar with the 2-D interactions and they will interact with the 3-D environment in the same way while using a mobile device. This often results in interactions with the digital content in AR not being intuitive.
  Eg. In the ThoughtArena app we discussed in last article, users did not realise that they needed to physically move around or move their phone or tablet to be able to work on the virtual board.
  We needed to design a good onboarding experience, that properly communicated and educated the users about these interactions, to help them to get familiar with the new experience.
• We need to build hybrid user interactions of both digital and physical worlds, keep the best out of both worlds.
  Eg. During the user testing phase of the ThoughtArena app, we experienced that many of the users would like to use the gestures and patterns that are familiar to them. Users want to zoom in and out on the board or board items, however, there is nothing like zoom in and out in the real world. In the real world, in order to see things more clearly, we just move closer to the objects. Similarly, on a real board, editing is done by removing and adding an item again, however, in a virtual board, users expect an edit functionality on the added objects. For the best experience, we should include the best features of both 2D and 3D.
• Understanding the environment — As AR technology lets you add virtual content to the real world, it’s important to understand the user needs and their real-world environment. While designing an AR solution consider what use cases, lighting conditions or different environments your users will be using the product in. Is it a small apartment, vast field, public spaces? Give users a clear understanding of the amount of space they’ll need for your app and the ideal conditions for using it.
• Be careful before introducing a new interaction language. XR interactions itself are new to a lot of users. We realized that at this stage it would be too much for the users to introduce a completely new language of interaction. We followed Jakob’s Law of UX, and continued the 2D board and sticky paradigm in the 3D environment, tried to keep interactions such as pasting notes, moving from one place to another, removing etc similar to what we do in 2D.
• We have also researched on if 3D arrangement of content is always better than 2D arrangement, and found that spatial cognitive memory comes into play if the objects are distincts in look and feel and lessor in number, but if there is a large number of similar objects arranged in 3D then the user interfaces look more cluttered. Ref : 2D vs 3D
• Text Input is a challenge in XR applications. If one takes the text input in the spatial environment, then the 3D on-screen keyboard needs to be shown to the user, and it is hard to take input from there. Another way is to take text input with a 2D keyboard from the device, but then it breaks the immersive experience. User interface needs to be designed to provide pseudo immersion.
• Define product aesthetics — Define color, theme and application logo. We conducted a survey to take an opinion of different color themes. Based on the environment, color of the UI component may be adjusted to have better visibility.
• XR spatial apps may allow users to roam around in the space. It may be a remedy for zoom fatigue and may break the monotonous style of working. This may also make people more creative or attentive or atleast lead to a healthy work style. At the same time we need to be careful while designing interactions, for following reasons

Too much movement may cause physical fatigue.

It may be fatal if the user is in an immersive environment and not conscious of the real environment while interacting with virtual objects.

Phone based XR applications where the user needs to hold a phone awkward position for a longer duration would cause strain in hand.

Understand human anatomy while designing user experience in XR.

(Refer detailed articles by Siddarth Kengadaran)

• Field of view (FOV) — The field-of-view is all that a user can see while looking straight ahead both in reality and in XR content. The average human field-of-view is approximately 200 degrees with comfortable neck movement. Devices with less FOV provide less natural experience.
• Field-of-Regard (FOR) — It is the space a user can see from a given position, including when moving eyes, head, and neck.
• Content positioning needs to be carefully defined, and provide provision to change the depth as per user’s preference. The human eye is comfortable focusing on objects half a meter to 20-meters in front of us. Anything too close will make us cross-eyed, and anything further away will tend to blur in our vision. Beyond 10-meters, the sense of 3D stereoscopic depth perception diminishes rapidly until it is almost unnoticeable beyond 20-meters. So the comfortable viewing distance is 0.5-meters to 10.0-meters where we can place relevant contents
• Neck/Hand movement — We need to position the primary UI element in the direct FOV without neck/hand movement, and secondary UI elements can be placed with neck/hand movement. UI elements which are placed beyond range require physical movement. Length of arm is another vital factor, It is essential to consider arms while designing UI, try to place fundamental interactions within this distance.

This are some of the practices for user experience design for XR solutions.

Next we share best practices for XR development and testing.

< Part 1: XR Product Definition || Part 3: XR development and testing >