08. Lesson Review
In this lesson we learned…
What is design?
Purpose, planning or intention that exists or is thought to exist behind an action, fact or object.
How can I learn more about VR design?
Explore other VR experiences and examine the design techniques they’ve used. You can take notes about what you liked, didn’t like, and what you think the designer had intended with each point.
What is the design process?
The design process is the way we work when creating something. A good process for software design typically includes sketches, user testing and iteration. The goal is to start by using fast solutions, and then gradually upgrade the experience after you’ve validated you’re getting the intended results (through user testing).
What does it mean to iterate?
Iteration essentially means to create something and then create a newer, better version of that thing.
Why is it important to test a VR experience in the headset?
It’s very difficult to know what your experience will be like until you’ve experienced it in the headset. Over time, you may get better at guessing if things are working as you intended, but it’s still a good practice to test it on a device frequently. It’s very hard to determine things like scale, spatial audio, color and other factors when looking at it in the Unity editor.
What does “going in early and often” mean?
This means putting your experience on your headset and trying it out. This is vital because it allows us to fail fast. Every time we go into our headset, we’ll learn things about the experience. Maybe our scale is off or the color isn’t quite right. If we waited until our experience was “done”, we wouldn’t know about our mistakes until the end. It’s much easier to change and fix things when we’ve made a small number of changes, rather than changing everything at the end.
What is user testing?
User testing is a vital part of our development process. During user testing, we will actually put our experience in the hands of other people and get their feedback. Ultimately we’re building our experience for other people to enjoy. Since other people don’t have the same knowledge or experience we do, it’s very hard to guess what others will like or understand.
Some reasons user testing is important:
- You don’t have control over our user’s attention. We don’t know where users will look.
- VR design patterns are still being established. Best practices are still being determined.
- Dealing with sim sickness, discomfort, and fear.
- VR is a physical medium. People are actually moving around in a physical space. Be sure to test with people of all shapes and sizes.
Consider the following use cases:
- How would the experience be for a taller person? A smaller person?
- How does the experience change for right-handed individuals? Or left-handed people?
- What about people with color-blindness? Or other disabilities?
Each scenario is something that we would learn about through user testing, listening to our users’ feedback, and iterating upon our design.
What is documentation?
Documentation is a way of keeping track of your work. This could be a photo of a sketch, a screen capture, or video of a user test. This documentation makes it clear that you have a solid, repeatable process that leads you to building a great experience.