Reminders to Self: Lessons in Designing for AR & VR
It’s been a little while since I’ve worked on an AR/VR product, so who knows what new tech has come out since then..but these are some lessons I don’t want to forget about in the future if I end up in the industry again.
“AR? VR? Is that what this is?”
1. Actually avoid the phrases AR and VR. They’re too technical for the average user, who doesn’t know what they are, nor the difference. It won’t matter, because it should really just feel like MAGIC. If the experience doesn’t wow the user, it might as well be ancient technology because no one can tell that it’s the hippest new AR/VR tech anyway.
I know this is a common solution for locomotion in VR, but there’s gotta be something better…
2. Ask yourself, do people want an “improvement” to reality? Or do they just want to feel like they’re in an alternate reality? Make sure the design change to the virtual world you’re making is actually better than the physics in the existing world. Do people really want to be able to teleport willy-nilly? Or is that just going to make them sick? Fidelity to real world physics is actually already really impressive to users.
3. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking AR by itself is going to make people want to pull out their phones and open an app in the middle of an activity. Yelp had the “monocle” feature back in 2009 — which is actually useful and not just a pure-entertainment-AR feature like most AR products now — and people still didn’t use it.
Did you know this still exists in the Yelp app? It’s a hidden feature under the “More” tab.
4. Remember it’s still just a product in the end, same as any other. Don’t get distracted by the buzzwords. Users are users — they don’t have patience normally, and they still won’t give your product the time of day if it doesn’t capture their attention within the first 30 seconds, no matter how you cool you promise the technology will be.
5. …On the same note, don’t be intimidated that you’re working in a nascent space, because it IS still just a product. Keep calm, because all the new tech in the world won’t render the important core tenets of user-centered design meaningless.