UI/UX’s Role in Virtual Reality

UI/UX plays a very crucial role in the success of any digital product and so is the case with Virtual Reality products. For Virtual Reality where the success of the product depends on how immersive the experience is, UI/UX design becomes even more important. In this article, we will discuss how UI/UX impacts Virtual Reality and what is its role in the success of any Virtual Reality product or service.

UI/UX’s Role in Virtual Reality

What is Virtual Reality?

Virtual Reality is a new form of technology that immerses you in a 3-dimensional environment that seems real taking away the limitations of the real world and allowing you to go wherever you want to and see whatever interests you. It is a simulated experience used in multiple industries like the gaming industry, entertainment industry, educational industry, etc. Virtual Reality allows you to fully immerse yourself in a digital simulated environment using a Virtual Reality Headset by blocking out the real world. You can lose yourself in video games or you can find a very serene place for meditation or yoga.

Virtual Reality is no longer a future thing, today virtual reality is increasingly used for commercial applications, gaming applications, casual applications, etc. It is slowly becoming a part of the lives of many people. Other than these daily applications, Virtual Reality is being used for training police in multiple countries, and military training, and is recently seeing its application in the ed-tech sector for teaching students with an immersive classroom environment in the comfort of their homes.

What is UI Design?

UI design or User Interface design is the process of creating visual interfaces for any website, application, or piece of software. User interface is referred to all the visual or graphic elements a user interacts with in a platform. There are lots of businesses where a designer will play both parts, but there are also a lot of designers who specialize in UI design. UI designers help users to navigate an interface by using visual cues.

What is UX Design?

UX design or User Experience design is the process of creating the experiences or the interactions that a user has with a product, website, application or piece of software. User experience refers to the overall experience of a customer or a user using a product, platform or service. The basic principle of UX design is to keep the needs of the user prior and improve the interaction of the user and the product keeping this in mind.

What is XR?

XR stands for Extended Reality, it is an umbrella term that is used for various technologies that immerses you in a virtual world partially for completely using various XR tools. In simpler terms, XR blends the real world with the virtual world.

Extended Reality (XR) in the combination of these technologies:

• Virtual Reality (VR)
• Augmented Reality (AR)
• Augmented Virtuality (AV)
• Mixed Reality (MR)

What is XR Design?

XR design or Extended Reality design is the process of designing the user experience for XR products and services. In XR design, we design user interfaces, interactions and experiences for products and services in the Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR) field.

You can consider XR design to be a new way of creating UI/UX design for Virtual reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR) related products and services.

Responsibilities of an XR Designer

An XR designer is responsible for the following roles and responsibilities:

• Conceptualization and defining the objectives of the application.
• Designing Interactions.
• Prototyping and testing.
• 3D modeling.
• Optimizing the design.
• Collaboration with cross-functional teams.
• Staying updated on latest trends from the industry.
• Ensuring accessibility.
• Testing the design.
• Documentation.
• Technical knowledge of XR platforms.

UI/UX’s Role in Virtual Reality

Now that we know why do we need UI/UX design in Virtual Reality, to extend those points, here are some points on UI/UX’s Role in Virtual Reality:

Immersive design is key for a good VR application:

The importance of immersiveness cannot be explained more, Immersive design is the cornerstone of a successful VR application. If the application is not immersive, it does not give a feeling of a real stimulated world, no other feature will be able to sustain that applications success. Through UI/UX Design or XR design or VR design, one can create these immersive designs capturing the users attention.

Comfort is a make or break for user retention:

For example, what if your application covers more that the user’s sight and the user has to move hi/her head in order to see your entire application. This example shows how comfort can cause your application a disadvantage, even if your application has the best of the best functionalities, these small UI/UX design principle are the ones that stays with the user the most.

UI/UX helps with navigation in the VR application:

It is the responsibility of UI/UX designers or VR designers to create a proper user navigation design for the VR application. Navigation in VR application is as important as it is in any other website, application on any product in general. By following proper UI/UX design principle you can design application with a great user navigation features.

UI/UX defines how you interact with the Stimulated world:

In VR, the role of UI/UX is to design how the user interacts with the simulated world. A VR designer designs interactions like what happens when user touches or picks up an object. Interaction should not require people to do specific things, unusual pose or gesture or any other unusual interaction. This can be done by properly designing the interactions keeping in mind the user’s perspective.

A good VR interface is impossible without proper UI/UX design:

The first thing and the last thing that the user interacts with in a VR simulation is the interface. This makes designing an interface a very important role of a VR designer. A good VR interface is a result of following the best UI design practices in VR. We will also discuss some of these best practices later in this article.

Why Learn UI/UX Design in VR Technologies?

Actually we should call it XR design, but for addressing beginners in the field let’s call it UI/UX design for a while. Here are some of the reasons why learning UI/UX design in VR technologies can be beneficial for you.

• Expanding job opportunities: AR and VR are technologies that are here to stay they have incredible real use cases in a lot of Industries. The XR market as lately seen a lot of growth which leads to more demand of XR designers because most XR experiences so far are not that good and not many designers are into XR, this can provide you will edge over others.
• Better Salary: Since there are not much XR designers in the market. It is pretty much evident that the limited supply has far exceeded the demand and XR designers are paid a lot more than UI/UX designers. Average salary of an XR designer in the US is $91,000 as compared to $70,000 of a UI/UX designer.
• Working on challenges and Innovation: Virtual Reality designing helps you to create more immersive, interactive, engaging and emotional experiences and you get an opportunity to create cutting-edge new experiences that shape and redefine how we interact the VR technology.
• The growing use cases of VR: immersive technologies like VR have the possibility to revolutionize pretty much any industry – it can be used in education industry, Healthcare industry, entertainment industry, interior design industry, manufacturing, Sports and Fitness, real estate, advertising, marketing, tourism and what not. This will make you a really valuable asset for your company or your business.

U/UX Best Practices for VR

Here is a list of best UI/UX practices for Virtual Reality applications, These are not just limited to virtual reality, but are also useful for all the extended reality technologies like augmented reality, and mixed reality.

• Design for Comfort: by comfort we basically mean that avoid designing interactions or experiences that make people exert themselves in a way that they are not used to. The users should be able to do stuff easily without any discomfort. While designing XR experiences always think of your audience and who that interaction or movement might be hurting, or who might not be able to perform any of those actions.
• Try to design something that is viewable in a frame: depending on the device you will be designing, try to design something that the viewer is able to view and use without making someone move his or her head a lot.
• Avoid user fatigue: by avoiding user fatigue we basically mean giving the user an easy way to work on an environment. For example, in order to exit an application press this button to exit and also provide a possible opportunity for them to save their progress before they leave.
• Appropriate scaling: Scaling is very specific to the device you may be designing for but if we take an example of designing buttons, focus on how big buttons should be for a mobile phone or a VR or a headset? try to make sure that there is enough space around your buttons so that someone doesn’t accidentally press something else they didn’t wanted to press.
• Interactions: there is a difference between interactions in web or general UI/UX and interactions in the VR world. interactions in VR technologies specifically refer to actually touching and picking up an object. interaction should not require people to do specific things, unusual pose or gesture or any other unusual interaction. This helps in ease of using your application.

Conclusion

Like we discussed in the intro to the article, Virtual Reality is no more a future’s thing, today virtual reality is increasingly used for commercial applications, gaming applications, casual applications, etc. it is slowing becoming a part of lives of many people. and UI/UX plays a very crucial role in success of Virtual Reality products since the success of the VR products or services depends on how immersive the experience is, UI/UX design becomes even more important. UI/UX designing for VR is a growing field with immense potential and a very important role to shape the future of XR (Extended reality).