UX Design for Augmented Reality: Blending Digital and Physical Worlds

UX plays a very crucial role in the success of any digital product and so is the case with Augmented Reality products. For Augmented Reality where the success of the product depends on how immersive the experience is, UX design becomes even more important. In this article, we will discuss how to design user experiences for Augmented Reality.

UX Design for Augmented Reality

What is Augmented Reality?

The integration of digital data with the user’s surroundings in real-time is known as Augmented Reality. It is a method by which users can experience a real-world environment with generated perceptual information overlaid on top of it. What Augmented Reality devices do is that they create an overlaying layer of digital 3-dimensional images onto the real world to enhance them.

Augmented Reality is no longer a future thing, today Augmented Reality is increasingly used for commercial applications, gaming applications like Pokemon Go, Social media applications like Snapchat, etc. It is slowly becoming a part of the lives of many people.

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.

UI/UX Design for Augmented Reality

Now that we what Augmented Reality is, to extend those points, here are some points on UX design’s Role in Augmented Reality:

• Immersive design is key for a good AR application: The importance of Immersiveness cannot be explained more, Immersive design is the cornerstone of a successful AR 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 UX Design or XR design or AR 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 his/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 UX design principle are the ones that stays with the user the most.
• Design helps with navigation in the AR application: It is the responsibility of UX designers or AR designers to create a proper user navigation design for the AR application. Navigation in AR application is as important as it is in any other website, application on any product in general. By following proper UX design principle you can design application with a great user navigation features.
• UX defines how you interact with the Stimulated world: In AR, the role of UX design is to decide how the user interacts with the simulated world. An AR 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 AR interface is impossible without proper UX design: The first thing and the last thing that the user interacts with in a AR simulation is the interface. This makes designing an interface a very important role of a AR designer. A good AR interface is a result of following the best UI design practices along with proper user interaction design.

Why Learn UX Design in AR Technologies?

Here are some of the reasons why learning UX design in AR technologies can be beneficial for you.

• Expanding job opportunities: AR technologies that are here to stay they have incredible real use cases in a lot of Industries. The AR market as lately seen a lot of growth which leads to more demand of AR designers because most AR experiences so far are not that good and not many designers are into AR, this can provide you will edge over others.
• Better Salary: Since there are not much AR designers in the market. It is pretty much evident that the limited supply has far exceeded the demand and AR designers are paid a lot more than web designers. Average salary of an AR designer in the US is $91,000 as compared to $70,000 of a web designer.
• Working on challenges and Innovation: Augmented 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 AR technology.
• The growing use cases of AR: immersive technologies like AR 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.

UX design Best Practices for AR

Here is a list of best practices for Augmented Reality applications, These are not just limited to Augmented reality, but are also useful for all the extended reality technologies like Virtual 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 AR 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 an AR device. 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 UX and interactions in the AR world. interactions in AR 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, Augmented Reality is no more a future’s thing, today Augmented reality is increasingly used for commercial applications, gaming applications, casual applications, etc. it is slowing becoming a part of lives of many people. and designing user experiences for AR technologies plays a very crucial role in success of Augmented Reality products since the success of the AR products or services depends on how immersive the experience is, UX design becomes even more important. Designing for AR is a growing field with immense potential and a very important role to shape the future of AR Technologies.