VR – Virtual Reality

Powering Up your UX Research with Virtual Reality

Research is vital in UX development and usually involves questionnaires, surveys, and interviews. However, gauging the design's functionalities requires quantifying user interactions and participant behavior. Near-exact experiences of the actual UX design can be helpful in this regard. However, this involves complex concepts and expensive prototypes that are hardly modifiable. Virtual Reality implementation is a context-specific way to overcome these UX research challenges. It helps transport people to many places virtually, teach new skills, and even fight phobias.

We at Radiant Digital are excited about new technologies that can potentially transform how we work! Virtual Reality is one of them. In this blog, we deep-dive into where VR UX research is already in practice and how it powers up UX research.

Why VR in UX Research?

UX research involves gauging user-product interactions within a physical, social, and cultural context. Virtual Reality (VR) can enhance UX research by creating realistic-looking virtual environments (VEs) with better environmental control and ecological validity. Some of its applications include:

• Researching workflows or interactions in developing virtual layouts.
• Display or configuration-related details can be built, experienced, and judged in VR.
• Safety and convenience in UX are other factors that can be effectively reproduced and evaluated by VR.

With VR, researchers can test a product’s user experience with higher visibility cost-effectively.

The Countless Possibilities

VR simulations apply to almost any actual space type in a variety of domains.

• Workplace occupational safety: VR modeling helps tackle workplace hazards when included in training exercises.

• Easing mental and physical health problems: VR applications are helpful in patient care, especially in diagnosis and curing phobias.
• Educational and training environments: Educators can promote skills development by leveraging a virtual domain where the real-world consequences of failing can be avoided.

With multi-sensory features, VR helps replicate an environment for a design and its user interactions while improving the scope for understanding the product’s real-world acceptance.

VR User Testing in the Service Industry 

Providers, primarily in the IT service domain, need to test product performance in near-real environments rigorously. For example, UX researchers can use VR to inject variable attributes into their UX design in a lab setting. This helps evaluate different results for different scenarios, environments, & conditions, or geographic disparities.

VR as a UX Evaluation Tool

VR is helpful for UX research and human–product interaction. It helps with the following:

• Obtaining insights on the users' needs and expectations by observing and evaluating the users' behavior during design interaction in a controlled environment.

• Focusing on UX evaluation through optimizing human–product interactions.

• Gaining information on target users and their behavior in a 3D multi-user virtual environment.

• Gauging emotional levels during user interactions and translating that to data on the users' preferences and needs.

• Enabling usage changes while observing natural and subjective responses.

• Obtaining data related to performance, errors, and learnability.
• Mediating interactions with realistic and directly controlled user avatars with motion trackers.

Best Practices for VR User Research

VR in UX combines conventional usability testing and a contextual interview. Some unique factors to consider include:

Preparation

The Environment:

• Evaluate the space where you will conduct the VR experiments for your design.
• Configure a "mixed reality lab" for the infrastructure to conduct augmented and virtual reality UX research.
• Perform safety checks and remove any obstacles to free movement.

The Technology: It is essential to know the underlying technologies impacting your research in a cross-functional environment.

The Subject: Ensure your target users know what they are signing up for by briefing them thoroughly on the requirements and how to handle the experience. UX researchers should ensure:

• Participant comfort.
• The clarity in technology concepts and goals.
• Digital data analysis is done before, during, and after an experience.
• Awareness of possible motion sickness or mobility issues affecting participants.

The Equipment:

• Test the VR equipment and the software for performance after synchronization.
• Check if the gadgets are cleaned regularly and make users comfortable without disorienting them.

Privacy:  UX researchers should clarify what data they'd collect and how it will be used when conducting VR research from a participant's home or device.

Recruitment: Understanding the users' digital knowledge and experience in the VR space is crucial while recruiting them.

Research plan: VR combines physical, emotional, and digital experiences, which mandates clarifying the following:

• Which aspects of UX design are you testing and whether it correlates to the device setup or the application?
• What user behavior traits are you observing?
• What you'll be recording and how?

Make your research seamless by setting up your research plan and the required tools.

VR User Testing

During VR sessions, you must consider the following differences between VR and conventional user testing.

Unfamiliarity with the technology: Users need buffer time to attune themselves to the technology, equipment, and environment. It is paramount to plan and explain the sequence in which the participant would navigate different experiences.

Cybersickness: Please note any symptoms and metrics (such as frame rate, session length, sudden acceleration, standing versus seated position, the participant's age, etc.) of cybersickness and only proceed when the participant is ready.

Facilitation: Noting verbal and non-verbal cues without distractions is crucial while observing the user and their interactions. VR facilitation is challenging because the user experiences a simulated environment context different from that of the interviewer.

Recording and notetaking: Ensure that participants look in your direction to record their expressions and emotional responses correctly. Use cameras and notetaking tools to obtain clear user feedback.

After the Experience 

Post-interview: UX researchers must keep a checklist to clarify the user’s experience with a design and note any negative feedback that can help fix loopholes.

Key Takeaways

VR helps identify the core concepts, evaluation methods, and limitations of your UX design to validate user acceptance. Though VR is still work-in-progress w.r.t market penetration, integrating it with UX research can unfold novel ways of fulfilling user-centric designs.

Radiant Digital can help you convert your Virtual Reality Vision to Enterprise Reality Designs. Contact us to know more.

by Alka Singh