One of the most critical skills for a designer or developer is the ability to receive and interpret feedback. However, learning how to receive feedback has been a process that has taken 20 years, and everyday there is still something new I am learning about this skill.

• When I got my first coding job, I had just finished a summer of reading textbooks and taking courses about Matlab and Python. My first week in, I had written over 4000 lines of code, and the program was flawless. As my boss walks in, you can practically feel me beaming as I proudly show him my progress. In about 3.14 seconds, he looks at my code and says,

“You know, you could have written this entire program in 100 lines.”

I spent the week deflated, as sweat poured down my forehead every time my boss walked by. He must think I am stupid and a terrible programmer — why else was he so condescending? After that point, I would quickly swap the windows on my screen so he would not see my code in progress until I re-factored it for the 10th time. This was my first experience with real feedback and I took it like a personal punch to the gut.

• When I got my first design job, I spent the first month working on the design of a feature in a small, unknown game. My peers and I were ecstatic about this feature — it was going to completely change the game and add a new dimension that would attract hundreds (!) of new users. However, when the user research team ran the first user study, new players of the game were not interested. Users were saying things like, “Yeah, it was OK I guess.” The feedback would not defeat me though. I decided to double down, after all, the users were not design experts — what do they know about good design? I thought, this is just the MVP (minimum viable product). If I just finished the other features I had designed, users would love it! I was wrong. Instead of making a pivot and potentially succeeding in Month 2, we ended up shuttering the project a year later.
• At my second design job, a senior designer approached me and briefly mentioned, “I tried that design before, and it didn’t work out. Have you considered this instead? We never got a chance to try it, but it seemed promising.” I was intrigued since he was a design expert, but I thought, “But we’re not that company, it will be different this time.” I was wrong. Surprisingly, the feature didn’t work out again.

Lessons from 20 Years of Feedback

• Feedback isn’t personal. When a user, another designer, or a team member gives you feedback, it is not a personal attack on you. Receiving negative feedback on your project does not make you a bad designer — not listening to feedback does. Design is an iterative process, and very few designers ever get it right on the first try. Every piece of feedback is a perspective that your team could potentially learn valuable insight from; however, it is critical to understand that as the designer, you do not have to act on every piece of feedback!
• Design is iterative, but MVP means “Minimum” AND “Viable.” When receiving feedback, it is important to always record the following: (1) how often has the team heard the same feedback? (2) what is the priority on this specific piece of feedback? If users have given repeated feedback that a product is not compelling or an interaction does not feel great, be conscious of every designer’s trap: falling in love with your design. Every user test and every piece of feedback is a valuable learning that could help inform the question: should we pivot? Pivoting is not inherently bad, and is a part of the iterative process. Being overwhelmed with negative feedback, but making a pivot that ends up with a successful design or product is one of the most difficult, painful, but rewarding lessons every designer should learn. A follow-up and surprising lesson is: your team members will respect your leadership and competence as a designer even more when you make the tough call to pivot. For more information running an iterative product process and the importance of feedback leading to validated learnings that can inform product pivots, I highly recommend Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup and The Startup Way.
• Ask Questions. Your role as a designer is to understand the user, and fight for them — not against them. If the user has negative feedback, do not argue with them about the “right” way to use the product as you designed. Ask them questions! What did the user expect when they used a specific feature? Why did the user stop using a particular feature? What was the user trying to actually do? As a designer, asking questions is the only way you will be able to solve problems and make the best possible product. Finally, always remember that users may not know exactly what they want, or what they like — as a designer, it is your job to dig a layer deeper, and try to understand the meaning behind the feedback.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jeffrey Lin, Ph.D.

Jeffrey Lin is currently a Design Director of AR/VR Experiences at Facebook leading design teams that are paving the way for the first generation of virtual and augmented reality content. He was previously a Design Director at Magic Leap, and Lead Designer of the award-winning PC game League of Legends at Riot Games, one of Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For. He was also a Research Scientist at Valve Software, makers of the award-winning PC game Portal 2, and creators of the Steam platform. He obtained his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Washington where he was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His design work has been featured in Wired Magazine, MIT Tech Review, The Verge, Scientific American, Times Health & Science, and Re/code. His research has been featured in numerous peer reviewed journals, including Nature.

Historically, when evaluating or providing feedback on designs, you might typically hear, “Well, that is your opinion.” Unlike the subjective nature of art, the science of design has been maturing over the last decade and arguably, it is now possible to objectively evaluate many designs due to the rise of the User Research discipline.

Here is a framework that can help you objectively evaluate the design of your next product:

1. Who is the target audience, and what use case are we solving? Regardless of experience, designers sometimes fall into the trap of designing for themselves. It is critical that very early in product development, the first thing you do is create a Persona (a fictitious character or person that represents your target audience) and Use Cases (the specific problems, pain points or activities that your product will solve or improve). At every step of the design and development process, if the product does not solve the pain points or improve the use cases for the Persona, you most likely need to re-visit your fundamental design. The earlier you test your product with external users, the higher the chance your team can correctly identify fundamental design issues and make a successful product; if you are too far into the development process and have started creating beautiful visuals for your product, a potential risk is that stakeholders may not be able to distinguish the difference between a “great” design, and beautiful visuals. Unfortunately, no matter how beautiful the visuals are, users will not use or enjoy your product if it does not solve a fundamental problem or improve their use cases.
2. How do the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) stack up across mediums? In modern design thinking, design teams have to consider that hundreds of products across mediums are essentially competing for a user’s attention and time in any given space; if you are creating a computer game, you are not necessarily justcompeting against other computer games. You are also competing against other forms of entertainment such as mobile games, escape rooms, TV, movies and concerts. Understanding what mindspace your product occupies in the user’s daily life will help your team identify the competitors across mediums to compare against. In virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR), a common mistake is to only compare features or KPIs within mediums. For example, your product team might be developing a new text input method for virtual reality. A month later, they may have invented a new design that allows users to input text at 10 Words Per Minute (warning: completely fictional statistic). Then, the product team compares text input methods across all known competitors in virtual reality and realize that they have beaten all known text input methods by 20% — they are thrilled! However, the team failed to realize that users rarely just compare within mediums. 10 Words Per Minute in virtual reality is not impressive to users and can even feel like an awful experience if you consider that users average ~40 Words Per Minute on a PC and 25–44 Words Per Minute on a Mobile Phone. When evaluating your designs and KPIs, always remember that competitors across mediums might be raising the expectations and bar of what users expect — be wary of just focusing on your genre or medium!
3. How were the interactions tested? When evaluating the design of your interactions in VR, AR or MR, common variables to measure might be: (i) Accuracy (how often a user’s intentions match the outcome; or, how precise a user is with a given interaction), (ii) Ergonomics (or, sometimes referred to as the “energy cost” or “energy expenditures” associated with the interaction given the muscles being utilized), (iii) Learnability (or, sometimes referred to as how intuitive an interaction is to learn), (iv) Time to Complete (referring to the amount of time it takes to complete a particular action). Depending on your product, you might prioritize these variables differently; however, if any of these factors score extremely poorly, you most likely have a poor design. In VR, AR and MR, there are two nuances around testing interactions properly. One, many experiences currently do not stress test interactions for enough time. If your intended user experience is 1 hour, your product team should stress test the interactions for 1 hour. Interactions that feel OK and have low energy expenditures in the first 5 minutes might be unusable by the 1 hour mark. Secondly, learnability varies greatly depending on the video game experience of the users. Studies have shown that users who frequently play video games tend to learn faster, and improve their ability to do various cognitive tasks which map to interactions used in VR, AR and MR. Because of this, some product teams may accidentally conclude that their designs have excellent learnability when in fact, they had a biased sample of video gamers for their user tests. For VR, AR, and MR, it is critical to run all user tests with randomly sampled users with a mix of video gamers and non-gamers, all with no prior context or experience with your product. As tempting as it is to always run user tests internally, your co-workers most likely will have enough context and familiarity that they will always bias the user test. After all, any developers who have had experience developing in VR, AR or MR will most likely learn other interactions in these mediums faster than a user with no experience in these mediums.
4. How many features contribute to a sum greater than its parts? Great design will often weave together several different features that amplify each others’ effects. For example, multiplayer games will often give rewards or additional incentives for playing with friends; in addition, a Friends List feature might recommend potential friends to play with, and an eCommerce feature might give discounts when a group of friends buy a “Friend’s Bundle” together. Individually, these features will have positive KPIs for the product; but together, they combine powerfully to create a rich, social experience. Conversely, if a product has numerous features that have positive KPIs but very few have strong synergy, you may want to re-scope your design to include some more synergistic features, and cut the standalone features that have the lowest value for the Persona and the Use Cases you are aiming to solve or improve.
5. How are the Core Loops? Defined as the series of repeatable actions in your product, assessing the core loop is one of the most important aspects of a product. If you are creating a Match-3 Puzzle Game, the most frequent action your users are going to be doing is shifting blocks or tiles around — how does that feel? Do users enjoy doing it? Are the sound effects satisfying? How often do users make a mistake when moving their tiles? Product teams typically spend the vast majority of their time iterating and user testing their core loops. As I have mentioned before, for VR, AR and MR, product teams must test their core loops repeatedly with the same external users over time. If you are currently creating a VR/AR/MR product, the novelty effect is so powerful that every user that steps into your offices to test your product will most likely give you glowing results; however, that is a red herring. For current VR/AR/MR products, it is critical to do user testing focused on repeated sessions — get the same user to try your product an hour a day for multiple days, weeks, or months. For now, this is the only way to get accurate feedback for VR/AR/MR products.

Although the visual design and art style of a product can be subjective, hopefully this framework allows you to objectively evaluate the core design of a product and create something compelling for your users.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jeffrey Lin, Ph.D.

Jeffrey Lin is currently a Design Director of AR/VR Experiences at Facebook leading design teams that are paving the way for the first generation of virtual and augmented reality content. He was previously a Design Director at Magic Leap, and Lead Designer of the award-winning PC game League of Legends at Riot Games, one of Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For. He was also a Research Scientist at Valve Software, makers of the award-winning PC game Portal 2, and creators of the Steam platform. He obtained his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Washington where he was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His design work has been featured in Wired Magazine, MIT Tech Review, The Verge, Scientific American, Times Health & Science, and Re/code. His research has been featured in numerous peer reviewed journals, including Nature.

My opinions are my own, and do not reflect my company.

Whenever I introduce myself as a designer, the first thing people want to see is my art.

I always laugh and say, “I am a designer, but I can’t draw.”

It is a matter of time before virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) take over as the next evolution of social and entertainment platforms. Because of this, many companies are exploring these spaces hoping to be the next market leader to capture a piece of the pie; however, many of these companies are diving head first without a deep understanding of how to build a design team that can create a successful product.

For mobile or web content, you could “get away” with hiring a skilled Visual Designer. Or, you might have gotten away with stacking your entire design team with just User Experience (UX) and Visual Designers. However, as products got more complicated and companies got larger, designers began specializing into various design disciplines. Nowadays, for many VR/AR/MR projects — even small ones — it is much harder to succeed with just UX or Visual Designers because of how complex these types of projects have become.

Just like there are numerous types of engineers who have specializations across dozens of programming languages, there are numerous types of designers and each have different strengths and weaknesses. Here is a quick preview of some of the disciplines within design, their strengths, and their typical tools and deliverables:

1. Visual Designer: arguably the most well-known design discipline, everyone typically thinks of beautiful assets when they think about “design.” Visual designers are focused on the defining a brand or product’s unique style and voice; they are problem solvers that figure out the look and feel of your product using tools like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe InDesign. Visual designers can further specialize in areas like graphic design (focused on the creation of print designs and deliverables like posters and brochures) and UI design (focused on the creation of user interface elements like layouts, logos and icons). In game development, visual designers can also specialize in areas like concept art (focused on rapid, iterative sketches of characters, environments and other content), and 3D modeling (focused on the creation of 3D characters or objects). Visual Designers are not as concerned with how screens of a website connect to one another, or how users interact with the product; instead, you might hear Visual Designers talk about precise, “pixel-perfect” layouts and the creation of beautiful icons, logos, and other visual elements of the product.
2. User Experience Designer: UX Designers are focused on how users interact with your product, and how to make a product easy and efficient to use. For every feature in your product, how can users interact with it? How does a user navigate to a particular part of a website? How does a user add another user to their Friends List? How does a user take a snapshot in the application? How does a player change weapons in a game? UX designers typically create low-fidelity graybox wireframes that quickly illustrate how a product works through tools like Sketch and Axure. They might also deliver personas (the creation of a fictional person that fits the target demographic so the product team always understands who the product is designed for), or specialize as an User Researcher to conduct user research(where they design experiments for external users to better understand and optimize the user experience, or better understand user needs for particular product). UX Designers typically focus on rapid iteration through low-fidelity wireframes, and leave the “pixel-perfect” deliverables to Visual Designers.
3. Systems Designer: focused on the architecture and data structures that drive features in a product, Systems Designers tend to be a bit more quantitative than a typical designer. They are focused on creating Design Documents for complex features such as how a video game decides to pair players together for a game through a multiplayer matchmaking system, or how a recommendation engine comes up with suggestions for an eCommerce website. For a social experience, a Systems Designer might define how you match users together on a dating platform. For a game, they might create Design Documents that describe a leaderboard system, achievements system, or ranked ladder system. Their deliverables often contain algorithms, quantitative models or spreadsheets full of data created with tools like Excel or Matlab.
4. Game Designer: probably the second most well-known design discipline, Game Designers are focused on all aspects of design related to creating a video game. One of the most important aspects of game development that a Game Designer oversees is the Core Game Loop, which is typically defined as the repeatable series of actions that make a game fun to play. Over the past few decades, dozens of Game Design sub-disciplines have spawned including Level Designer (focused on the layout and creation of levels), Tech Designer (game designers who can also code using various programming languages), Character Designer (focused on the creation of characters and their “kits”, for character-driven games where characters have different abilities), and Content Designers (focused on the creation of consumable content, such as a raid boss in a Massive Multiplayer Online Game). Depending on the sub-discipline, Game Designers will use tools such as Google Docs, game engines such as Unity or Unreal, and presentation tools like Google Slides or Keynote to create their deliverables whether they are Game Design Documents (GDDs), or presentations for a new game.
5. Social Designer: social design is a pretty new design discipline that has emerged over the last decade. Social Designers focus on improving the social or human experience in a product. Over time, more and more companies have learned that the social aspects of their product are core drivers of growth, stickiness, and engagement. Social Designers focus on any feature, system, or experience where multiple users are interacting together in an activity. They often contribute to Design Documents with tools such as Google Docs, and presentation tools like Google Slides or Keynote. Right now, you will find most Social Designers employed at platform companies such as Facebook or Google as they explore ways to improve their online social experience through features or systems that can reduce online harassment while improving social interactions between their users. Other than social platforms, you will find Social Designers employed at game studios focused on multiplayer experiences such as Massive Multiplayer Online games (MMOs), and Multiplayer Online Battle Arena games (MOBAs).
6. Product Designer: this is going to be a controversial definition, but the meaning of Product Designer has recently been evolving in many industries. Product Designers are focused on the holistic product, and how every design discipline converges to create the best possible product. These days, they are typically well-versed in at least 2 of the other design disciplines and can individually create all deliverables for those disciplines. In addition, they are at least familiar with all design disciplines and all design deliverables involved in creating the product. They have also begun acquiring many skills typically seen in Producers and other production roles such as a strong understanding and ability to execute developmental processes like Agile, and strong people skills. On many product teams, Product Designers have become the “lead” designer, entrusted to lead and encourage close collaboration with all the other design disciplines on the product team.

The most important thing about building a design team for a new product is understanding the strengths of each design discipline. For a social platform, one possible composition for your ideal design team could be:

• 1 Social Designer acting as your lead Product Designer
• 1 Systems Designer
• 1 UX Designer
• 1 Visual Designer

For a complex video game, your ideal design team could be:

• 1 Game Designer
• 1 Systems Designer
• 1 UX Designer
• 1 Visual Designer
• 1 Game Designer focused on Level Design

If you build a design team that lacks the necessary skills for your product, you will most likely create a sub-par experience. Mismatches in skill are currently magnified in VR, AR, or MR because there is already a challenging learning curve for every design discipline as they learn how to adapt their design skills over to these new mediums. This is why you should never ask me to create beautiful “pixel-perfect” assets for your product (I specialize in Systems, Social, Game, and UX Design!); but, conversely, this is why you should be wary asking a Visual Designer to create a Design Document for a recommendation engine for discovering new friends on your social platform.

As a general guideline, most VR, AR, or MR products will require at least:

• 1 Product Designer (who specializes in at least 2 disciplines directly related to the product such as Systems, Games or Social)
• 1 UX Designer
• 1 Visual Designer

Hopefully, this article helps you build a design team that can create the next successful product.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jeffrey Lin, Ph.D.

Jeffrey Lin is currently a Design Director of AR/VR Experiences at Facebook leading design teams that are paving the way for the first generation of virtual and augmented reality content. He was previously a Design Director at Magic Leap, and Lead Designer of the award-winning PC game League of Legends at Riot Games, one of Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For. He was also a Research Scientist at Valve Software, makers of the award-winning PC game Portal 2, and creators of the Steam platform. He obtained his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Washington where he was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His design work has been featured in Wired Magazine, MIT Tech Review, The Verge, Scientific American, Times Health & Science, and Re/code. His research has been featured in numerous peer reviewed journals, including Nature.

My opinions are my own, and do not reflect my company.

Most developers exploring virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) are focused on finding the next medium-defining product; one of the first things developers discover is that when a VR, AR, or MR experience is social, it increases the immersion and engagement by leaps and bounds. Years of research from the Video Games industry have explored why social connections and experiences are critical components to extending the life of a product, and why social gameplay is a reason some of the most popular games are still played 10 years after their release (like DOTA, League of Legends, World of Warcraft, or a personal favorite, Ultima Online). So, it is not a surprise that many developers are trying to make the next great multiplayer game or social experience for VR, AR, and MR.

However, most developers trying to create a social experience do so within the confines of their internal playtests, or Friends and Family “Alphas” and “Betas.” Through the entire development cycle of many VR, AR, and MR products, most of the user testers are either friends, friends of friends, or coworkers who have an expected code of conduct and respect for each other.

When these products are released to consumers outside of the developers’ personal social networks, the developers are instantly exposed to the extremes of online behaviors — both positive, and negative. It only takes a few searches to see that online harassment in VR (Example 1, Example 2, Example 3), AR, or MR can be rampant — and because of the immersion — more damaging than any prior medium. Developers are then faced with the challenge of retroactively trying to re-design their social experience to be inclusive and safe before their product reaches a point of no return and fails due to a reputation as an experience prone to toxic or harassing behaviors.

So what can developers do to proactively design a more inclusive, and safe social experience?

1. Verbal Commitment, and a Community Code. In Social Psychology, there has been research on a phenomenon called verbal commitment. The basic idea is that if you explicitly ask and get affirmation from someone about some issue or task, they are more likely to commit to it and do it. So, if you want your kids to clean up their room, you should ask them, “Can I have your word that you will have your chores done by 5 PM tonight?” If the child verbally and publicly says, “Yes, I can,” they are more likely to actually do the task. One of the easiest ways developers can leverage the science behind this phenomenon is to present a “Community Code of Conduct” prior to users entering the online, social experience. This is not a typical Terms of Service agreement that most products have! Users rarely read those, and they have no impact on online behaviors in a social experience. The Community Code of Conduct has to be simple, easy to read (no legalese!) and should use “I” language. For example, “I will treat every user with respect, and failing to do so, will give up my privilege of being a part of this community.” Depending on how much you want to trade-off between the user experience and the strength of the verbal commitment, you can then utilize 3 options of affirmation: (1) the weakest option is simply having the user click “I Agree” after reading the Code. (2) The medium option is having the user type out the letters for “I Agree.” (3) The strongest option, but most unfriendly to the user, is to have the user type out the entire sentence. Depending on the product, a simple feature like this can reduce online harassment by over 20%.
2. Record Better Data. With engines like Unity streamlining the implementation of data analytics, there is no longer an excuse to not have data analytics for projects; however, developers should not just focus on the standard key performance indicators (KPIs) like CCU (concurrent users), or MAU (monthly active users). It is critical that developers specifically record data related to the social experience. Many developers will only record the basics, such as how often an user is reported for offensive behaviors — this is not good enough anymore. When it comes to new mediums like VR, AR, and MR, users are more likely to quit the experience and never try a product again instead of filing an accurate report against the offending user. After all, there are 1000 other products to try, why should they have to deal with offensive behaviors in one? Instead of just implementing a “Report” feature and recording basic reporting metrics, developers should also record secondary metrics. For example, for a given user, how often does another user “Block” or “Mute” them after an interaction? If a user in your social experience is getting Blocked or Muted often, that could be a red flag. For those who want to dig a little deeper into this space, consider learning about social network analysis. Through social network analysis, it is possible to analyze interactions between users, and see if some users are negatively impacting others. For example, think how powerful it would be if your developers could identify users that, after interacting with another user, increased the odds that the other user will log off and never return to the product? Nearly every developer records some form of data these days, but to optimize for a more inclusive and safe social experience, developers need to start recording the right data.
3. Feedback. When it comes to designing an inclusive and safe community in VR, AR, or MR, one of the most critical aspects is how you design the feedback loops. You cannot just implement features that allow a user to stop harassment after the fact such as the “Report” or “Block” features — these are the basics. If a user has to utilize these features, the damage is already done, and the user might disengage from your product and never return. In addition, if you never give feedback to the offending users, then your product or platform is effectively telling the offending users that their behaviors are OK, and the problem is the victim. As a general rule, the faster and more specific the feedback is, the better an user typically responds. In video games or social media platforms, companies used to “ban” users for offensive behaviors but the execution was generally poor. For example, an user might be extremely racist one day, but weeks later, the company would send the player an e-mail that looked something like this, “You have been banned for violating the Terms of Service. Please contact Customer Support for more details.” This is terrible feedback because it was delivered weeks after the offensive incident, and there are no specifics. Humans can barely remember what they had for lunch last week; we cannot expect users to remember what part of the Terms of Service was violated. Instead, these users will most likely blame the company for falsely banning them. This is a lose-lose situation for most products because the user ends up becoming angry, has no idea what behaviors to change, and simply makes a new account and re-joins the online community because the barriers of entry is pretty low for most products. When designing your Customer Service loops or reporting systems, make sure you have the fastest and most specific feedback loops possible — for both the offending user, and the victim. However, when creating fast feedback loops, please be aware of the below risk.
4. Feedback, Part 2. Another aspect of feedback that is critical to the product design is how you incorporate feedback into the user experience (UX) design. For example, in many products today, when a user “Blocks” or “Mutes” another user, the offending user gets a big flashing sign. “You have been muted by [User].” “You have been blocked by [User].” This is poor product design because this type of feedback can trigger and instigate even more negative behaviors. When a user is harassing someone, and they get a message that the other user has blocked them, it is like a boost of dopamine that lets the harasser know “they have won,” and “their behaviors had an impact.” When designing feedback systems, always make sure that you are not rewarding the offending users with any information about their victim that could trigger more negative behaviors. One solution is to not deliver the feedback immediately and have the feedback come from “the community,” so the offensive user cannot directly pinpoint which of their targets reported/blocked/muted them and triggered the feedback.
5. The Space Bubble. Products like AltspaceVR have begun exploring features specific to VR that can create a more positive online experience such as a Personal Space Bubble that can be toggled On/Off and either allow or block other users from entering your personal space. This is a great design that can improve online experiences; however, developers can push this further. For example, instead of a toggle, tying your Personal Space Bubble to your Friends List, which makes it a little easier to be choosy about who can enter your personal space. Or, adjusting the Personal Space Bubble based on the cultural context (such as having a more restrictive Personal Space Bubble for users from a culture that are more respectful/strict about personal space). You could also tie the Personal Space Bubble to other features we noted earlier in the article, such as automatically turning on the Personal Space Bubble against all users that have had a high number of users block or mute them.
6. Take Risks. On PC or mobile platforms, banned users can typically make a new account and rejoin the online experience in a few minutes; however, VR, AR, and MR are not like your regular mobile or PC experience — identities are tied to expensive hardware in most cases and the workarounds are less obvious. Platform companies can take risks, and completely remove users from their ecosystems for egregious offenses. It may sound ridiculous to remove potentially paying consumers from an ecosystem; but, some research has shown that for each egregious offender you remove from a platform, many more users stay engaged.

Designing social experiences to be inclusive and safe is not easy, and designers are still figuring out the best approaches to these types of issues. Hopefully, these tips help your product team to create more inclusive and safe products for VR, AR and MR by considering these issues in their product designs from Day 1. It is almost always more difficult to re-design products to solve for inclusiveness and user safety retroactively. If you are interested in more about this topic, check out my previous talk below:

1. More Science Behind Shaping Player Behavior in Online Games.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jeffrey Lin, Ph.D.

Jeffrey Lin is currently a Design Director of AR/VR Experiences at Facebook leading design teams that are paving the way for the first generation of virtual and augmented reality content. He was previously a Design Director at Magic Leap, and Lead Designer of the award-winning PC game League of Legends at Riot Games, one of Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For. He was also a Research Scientist at Valve Software, makers of the award-winning PC game Portal 2, and creators of the Steam platform. He obtained his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Washington where he was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His design work has been featured in Wired Magazine, MIT Tech Review, The Verge, Scientific American, Times Health & Science, and Re/code. His research has been featured in numerous peer reviewed journals, including Nature.

Creating inclusive, and safe social experiences in VR, AR, and MR was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Note, opinions are my own and do not reflect my company.

Several articles have thoroughly explained the difference between virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR); however, few articles have described the best types of products for each platform. In short, virtual reality closes off the real world, and completely immerses you with the feeling of presence in a digital world. Augmented reality is when you simply overlay digital content on the real world. For mixed reality, my friend Graeme Devine said it best: mixed reality is the mixture of the real and virtual worlds, so that one understands the other. In mixed reality, you feel copresence, such that you believe digital content is in the real world with you.

With the rise of the various VR platforms like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, and AR platforms like ARKit, more and more developers are exploring potential products across all of these mediums in the hopes that one of these platforms takes off in the future. You can see a sample breakdown of what platforms developers are currently exploring in a recent report from the 2017 Virtual Reality Developers Conference (VRDC) where 600 developers were surveyed.

However, to build a successful product for one of these mediums, developers need to truly understand what differentiates them.

• Virtual Reality. One unique strength of virtual reality is the large Field of View (FOV) — by completely closing out the real world, you can provide unparalleled immersion and presence for users, which is perfect for taking users to fantasy worlds such as Gringotts Wizarding Bank from the Harry Potter Universe, or remote but real locations such as the planet Mars. However, one of VR’s core weaknesses is locomotion (the inability to move around naturally without requiring a large space that no average user in the Valley ever has). Many products have tried to design around this problem with teleportation mechanics, where you can point at a location then tap a button to teleport there; some companies like NeatCorp have even done a great job optimizing this design to conclude that projectile mechanics results in more accurate teleportation for users. Even with this design, the fact remains that locomotion is not a strength of virtual reality — you have to design around it for now. So until the technology improves, developers should avoid directly translating game genres such as First- or Third Person Action Platformers (like Mirror’s Edge) or “Run and Gun” First Person Shooters (like Quake) that require precise, skill-based locomotion. Instead, developers should focus on products that take full advantage of the strengths of VR, such as On-Rail Experiences (where an experience intentionally has no locomotion and is “on rails,” such as being a passenger in a moving vehicle in the award-winning Pearl, or participating as a passenger in a car chase where the user has to look around and shoot at targets). Another great genre of games for VR right now are “cockpit” games such as Elite: Dangerous VR where users play a pilot in the cockpit of a vehicle, and the entire game is played while the character is stationary.
• Augmented Reality. I am going to keep this section brief, because depending who you talk to, it is a either a sub-category of mixed reality, or the same thing. One of the core strengths of augmented reality right now is the ability to be mobile with normal locomotion. You can experience augmented reality wherever you go, and some games like Pokemon Go have explicitly designed their mechanics to encourage exploration of the real world. However, many augmented reality platforms currently lack the ability for users to have complex interactions with the digital content, and are contained to small field of views (FOV) and screens (such as that of a mobile phone or tablet).
• Mixed Reality. AR and MR are probably the least understood mediums of the three. One of the strengths of MR is the ability to feel copresence, and bring digital content into the real world without excluding yourself from those around you. Although it feels magical to simply see digital content interacting with the real world, such as a digital character walking around furniture in your living room, it is important to realize this is heavily driven by a psychological phenomenon known as the novelty effect. For many people, content created by something like ARKit is the first time they have seen a digital object in the real world, and that alone is exciting. However, if you design products or games that rely heavily on the “wow” factor of seeing digital content in the real world for the first time, your product will fail. As more and more MR products release, or as users experience your product repeatedly, they will start getting accustomed to seeing digital content in the real world, and what used to be a “wow” will soon become “so what?” This also raises the importance of proper user testing. If you are currently creating an AR/MR product, the novelty effect is so powerful that every user that steps into your offices to test your product will most likely give you glowing results; however, that is a red herring. For current AR/MR products, it is critical to do user testing focused on repeated sessions — get the same user to try your product an hour a day for multiple days, weeks, or months. For now, this is the only way to get accurate feedback for AR/MR products.

So what should developers focus on in augmented or mixed reality?

• Core Loops. A popular term among designers in the Video Games industry, the core loop is what makes something engaging. It is the single most important part of any game or product, and is an intentionally designed chain of actions a user takes in a product (and is hopefully fun to repeat!) Because the novelty effect is so powerful in AR/MR these days, it is important that developers ignore the initial “wow” of seeing digital content in the real world, and focus on the basics of product design and develop a strong, engaging, fun core loop.
• Interactions. When you put digital content in the real world in front of someone, the vast majority of users want to interact with the digital content by reaching out their hands and simply grabbing the content. Many developers have focused on using a console controller, remote controller, or other input device that is an abstract mapping of controls for the digital content in the real world, and in many cases, it works decently. However, the developers that create products that allow users to do what they want and reach out and interact with the digital content in more physical ways will ultimately win. Secondly, it is critical right now to focus on experiences where digital content is interacting with the real world — without this, it simply is not mixed reality.
• Less is More. Because putting digital content in the real world is so amazing, a lot of developers erroneously start filling the entire world with digital content.

This is not a world any of us want to live in. One, it basically overwhelms the user with a sub-par VR experience, and no longer feels like AR/MR. Two, users are so used to the concept of a “digital screen,” that when this much digital content fills your field of view (FOV), they began to treat the experience like a screen and stop moving around (one of the strengths of AR!)

Hopefully, this article has helped your product team better understand one strength and one weakness of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) so that your team can make the best product for your chosen medium. When creating a product for these mediums right now, always ask yourself, “Is the current product design better in one of the other mediums?” If so, you may want to pivot sooner than later.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jeffrey Lin, Ph.D.

Jeffrey Lin is currently a Design Director of AR/VR Experiences at Facebook leading design teams that are paving the way for the first generation of virtual and augmented reality content. He was previously a Design Director at Magic Leap, and Lead Designer of the award-winning PC game League of Legends at Riot Games, one of Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For. He was also a Research Scientist at Valve Software, makers of the award-winning PC game Portal 2, and creators of the Steam platform. He obtained his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Washington where he was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His design work has been featured in Wired Magazine, MIT Tech Review, The Verge, Scientific American, Times Health & Science, and Re/code. His research has been featured in numerous peer reviewed journals, including Nature.

Creating the right products for VR, AR, or MR was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Lately, I have been working with numerous design teams exploring virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR). Regardless of design experience, most teams had an interesting story:

They would start with their previous design process, whether it was from making software or games; however, after they created the design documents, mocked up the wireframes, and began implementing, nothing worked because VR/AR/MR were just too new for anyone to understand what designs would or would not work. After this point, most teams concluded, “Let’s just start prototyping in code as soon as possible and iterate from there.”

Many teams would even point to the “Build-Measure-Learn” cycle from The Lean Startup Methodology to try to justify why it was great that their design process was getting shorter and shorter, yet the time it took them to actually create a compelling product took longer and longer.

In some ways, teams were missing the point. By skipping the early phases of design with the reason, “Well, we do not know if it will work until we test it on the hardware anyways,” design teams are now skipping an entire “Build-Measure-Learn” cycle that can happen in just the paper design phase of product development.

Product Designer Julie Zhuo once drew these images to describe the difference between a Junior Designer and a Senior Designer:

By jumping straight into prototyping in code, teams are behaving like a Junior Designer would, often asking engineering teams to chase leads as they emerge until they hopefully arrive at a solution. To get around this issue, my design teams have been following a few simple tips to ensure that we are always learning how to design for VR/AR/MR and over time, have cut down the iteration time needed to create a compelling product:

1. Make predictions. When you first start designing in VR/AR/MR, your designs will rarely work when you start implementing them in code. That is OK. However, encourage your design teams to still create and iterate on paper design documents and make predictions. Write down why the design might work in VR/AR/MR. Why might it fail? If it fails, what are the alternative designs that we could try? It is important to write down and create these hypotheses, so you can test and discuss the outcomes with the team when you do prototype in code. Over time, your design team will learn how to make better predictions, and paper designs will become more and more valuable because you will require less iteration time in code (which is arguably always more expensive than design iteration on paper!)
2. Learn new tricks. More than ever before, it is critical for designers to learn more about other fields like visual attention, social psychology, and even stage magic to understand the nuances of designing for VR/AR/MR. One of the most common challenges with VR is the notion that a designer no longer has control of the “camera,” and the user can look wherever they like. However, by learning about visual attention and stage magic, you can learn about how the human brain works, and exploit it. For example, a motion onset (something that moves) in peripheral vision will tend to capture attention. You can use tricks like this to guide the user’s attention where you want.
3. Evolve how you wireframe. Traditionally, a design team might do wireframes in 2D using an application like Sketch or Axure; however, these tools were designed for screen-based experiences and are typically optimized for web or mobile experiences. For some teams, simply creating wireframes for VR/AR/MR with these tools constrains their design thinking, resulting in experiences that feel pretty similar to a web or mobile application. Push your design team to be more creative with how they create their wireframes. One team, for example, started creating cardboard props for everything in an experience, and their team members roleplayed the interactions. It is pretty silly to watch a team member hold a cardboard prop (say, of a UI Menu object), and have to move around the room as another team member “grabs and moves” the UI object while walking around the room themselves — but, it re-creates what the experience really might feel like in VR or MR more than a 2D wireframe. It is a matter of time before tools like Sketch and Axure create features specifically for wireframing for VR/AR/MR; but, for now, push your teams to try different solutions that better emulate what the experience actually would feel like for a user.
4. Less is more. Many design teams are so excited about the new spaces they are exploring that they keep thinking, “Wouldn’t it be cool if..?” Each time they think of a new novel mechanic or feature, they want to squeeze it into the current product design. At every point in a project, always take a second look at your feature list and think, “How much value is this really adding for the end user?” “Is this something we only use once in the entire experience?” In most cases, you are better off going with fewer features and just choosing the ones that maximize user value.

Hopefully, these steps empower your design team to cut down the iteration time needed to create compelling products in VR/AR/MR. This is an exciting time for designers, and everyone is fighting to be the team that creates the next medium-defining experience; however, just because it is unexplored space does not mean we have to throw away everything we have learned about how we do design.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jeffrey Lin, Ph.D.

Jeffrey Lin is currently a Design Director of AR/VR Experiences at Facebook leading design teams that are paving the way for the first generation of virtual and augmented reality content. He was previously a Design Director at Magic Leap, and Lead Designer of the award-winning PC game League of Legends at Riot Games, one of Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For. He was also a Research Scientist at Valve Software, makers of the award-winning PC game Portal 2, and creators of the Steam platform. He obtained his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Washington where he was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His design work has been featured in Wired Magazine, MIT Tech Review, The Verge, Scientific American, Times Health & Science, and Re/code. His research has been featured in numerous peer reviewed journals, including Nature.

The design process in VR, AR, and MR was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.