Designing a VR Content Creation App

Groundwork for something huge

This is the 2-min summary!

Full case study here

Skills demonstrated

UX Leadership

UX for VR

Affinity Mapping

Feasibility Evaluation

Priority Mapping

Competitive Analysis

Ideation Brainstorming

Mockup

Prototyping

Storyboarding

Platform

VR and Web

Main Tools

Figma

Miro

User Testing Service

Google Suite

Date Range

November 2021
to March 2022

(for this first phase)

Intro

In late 2021, our company's new direction was creating a more versatile app with many functionalities of what our current suite does, but with an emphasis on remixing and appealing all curious creatives. Big projects require investors, and thankfully ours were asking for the stuff we were making anyway.

I had some time to do research while devs created the back-end required for a headset-only app.

Research: Personas

As mentioned, this app would appeal to a wider range of creatives.

Using existing QA and customer relations, and conducting some interviews, our team compiled these proto-personas.

Ultimately, our product was for a group of humans who were, or wanted to be, engaged with an immersive and productive creative experience.

Research: Competitive analysis

Competition isn't between what labels your product is defined by, but rather what problems it is solving. We looked over 20 or so apps in their ability to accomplish the various goals we hoped to solve. This information will be helpful for affinity mapping.

Believe it or not, there are 9 more rows and about 10 more columns I didn't show here.

Research: Organizing ideas

I put together all the cards into an affinity map which helps bucket ideas into something easier to comprehend. This one is also grouped by the personas the notes or features require. Keeping the user research in mind, we voted on which tickets they would appreciate the most.

A prioritization matrix sorted by these votes helps us see which ones to focus on, for maximum bang-for-buck for our time.

We had everything we needed to start designing.

Design: converge and diverge

I suggested everyone create extremely rudimentary low-fi designs - these should be a very basic  (not even complete) vision of the app and incorporate ideas which stood out to them, prioritizing the most feasible and high-impact ones. Between myself and the 4 other minds doing this, we came up with lots of cool designs.

After a show-and-tell of our designs to each other, I combined them into an amalgamation of all the ideas as suitable to our research as possible:

This would be the first rudimentary storyboard of our main flows.

Design: low-fi prototype and testing

It was finally time to dive into Figma and create an interactive prototype. It had to be understandable to external testers. We decided to outsource testing to a trusted third-party due to resource limitations.

Conclusion

8 test participants evaluated the low-fi experience and we got lots of useful insights. We finally had something tangible to base our initial engineering off of, and this is where the story ends for now.

This case study was less about the specifics of what we did, and more about navigating the messy, realistic world of stakeholders, time constraints and knowledge organization. Regardless, I hoped that I was able to communicate the various problem solving strategies I could employ here.

Here are some out-of-context images of some developments I have made (or been heavily involved in) since then.