OutcomeResearchDiscoveriesSythesizeRefine
Take a flight to your own virtual world, go beyond your regular and typical meetings

Individual Role

User Research, Concept Development, VR Interaction Design, 3D Component Development

Tools

Figma, Revit, Enscape, Miroboard, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator

Timeline

7 weeks (Personal Project, Summer 2021)

Challenge

Reimagine and define what virtual communication and collaboration means to you.

H.U.B is a web VR app/metaverse for people in creative industries. Users can holistically showcase their work in an immersive and interactive environment; it goes beyond what can be done through current existing virtual meeting platforms.

Research Question

Why is it necessary to change how virtual communication platforms are currently being operated? How can designers develop the experience of connecting people together in a remote environment?
In order to understand the context of this challenge, I identified general issues that art and design professionals were facing when using virtual communication platforms. During this process, I noticed that current virtual communication platforms are causing people to lose focus due to lack of interaction and engagement, discourage opportunities to bond between classmates/coworkers, and have students/professionals to go through difficulties with accessing presentation or meeting materials from previous sessions.

User Interview

While referring back to the main problems, I have conducted several interviews with designers and students who are part of the art and design field. From these interviews, I was trying to understand the user's needs when using the virtual communication platform in depth.
“ When all meetings transitioned into video calls after COVID-19, it’s been really hard to focus on the contents discussed from the meeting.”
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- Designer working virtually with teammates
“ As we are forced to work digitally and communicate through virtual platforms, I feel disconnected from my classmates and have difficulties bonding with them.”
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- College student in virtual classes
“ Sometimes I need to recall back to materials from previous meetings and it’s difficult to follow up with clients to do so. ”
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‍- Designer working virtually with clients

Problem Statement

What methods make people feel like they are in the same atmosphere and session with other people? How can we utilize emerging technology to provide interactable and engageable experience?
From identifying key problems and extracting information from what I have interviewed, I was able to define roles that would be significant in operating virtual meeting sessions when using this product, and these are divided into three categories: host, presenter, and audience.
After identifying user group, I identified the kinds of frustrations and needs that each user group would have through personas that initially proposes how this digital product would operate.

Affinity Diagram

From what has been discovered in the personas, I extracted and organized significant components that are critical for each user group by creating an affinity diagram. During this process, I was able to get a better understanding of each user group’s problems and struggles with using video calls, which enabled me to build a foundation of clear visualization to create a better user experience of using virtual communication platforms.
Reflecting upon what has been researched and initially proposed, I structured the goals of this project into three categories.

Feature Prioritization

After having set goals for the project, I created a minimum viable product (MVP) list in order to map out features that need to be part of the platform. With this list, I categorized listed features by user value and complexity in order to see and compare overall features versus features that need to be prioritized the most.

Constructing Experience Structure

How is Virtual Reality system being used to smoothly connect and substitute
procedure of meetings/classes in physical environment into virtual environment?
Based on what has been investigated and analyzed, I used an overall experience flow to see how each of the user groups will be interacting with this product. Looking at the flow as a whole, I made it intentional for the experience of using this product to be holistic, allowing each user group to interact and engage with each other.
Then, I made an ideal scenario of how the overall experience of using this product would look like, while hinting out some of key features that are a significant part of the product. 

Idea Sketch

From analyzing what I have initially proposed for the overall experience of using this product, I started to create idea sketches while brainstorming ideas through 3D prototyping to get a clear visualization of how to make features that I had in mind into reality. 

Wireframing overall experience

After solidifying my ideas, I started to define the UI of this product more in depth to get a sense of what kinds of interfaces would be required in order to form an ideal scenario that I had in mind for this product. From what has been extracted and analyzed from initial proposals, this web VR app product is divided into two parts: Web Interface and VR Interface.

Implementing iterations as design solution

How is Virtual Reality system being used to smoothly connect and substitute
procedure of meetings/classes in physical environment into virtual environment?
Based on the wireframe that I have created, I was able to finalize the interface designs of this digital product. I intend this product to be used in both desktop and tablet interface, since these two devices are most commonly used for interacting with emerging technologies like AR and VR.

Feature Highlights

The first interface that the users would see is a dashboard; it allows users to easily organize virtual meeting sessions through several features displayed on the interface. The users will be able to open new sessions or access to previous sessions by clicking on the create session button or view all files buttons that shows the archive of previous sessions that were created by the host.
After going through the dashboard, when the users are hosting their own sessions, they will be required to enter in necessary information that is needed for scheduling the sessions. After confirming information for the session, users can select a template for creating their unit, which is a virtual space that will be used during their session.
After setting up the meeting room, the host will be able to send presenters and audiences to be part of the meeting room. The users would be able to see what has been uploaded in the virtual room, which allows them to either bookmark or leave comments when viewing information of the uploaded component. Furthermore, all of the user groups will be able to interact with the components in the virtual room, where users can either rotate or move around uploaded components.

Reflection and next steps

What did I learn?

As this was my first UX/UI and Virtual Reality related project, this project acted as a stepping stone to getting to know more about this industry; I remember that I was struggling a lot with softwares that were used in UX/UI industry since I never had the chance to use them beforehand. However, I enjoyed going through some of the processes in this project because processes like user research and interview aligned with what I did during school as an interior design major; with this project, though, I learned how user research and interview is operated a little bit differently since this is about designing a user experience, not designing a space that reflects on user’s context and interpreting what you have researched to form the structure of the space. 

Conducting multiple test trials from friends who are artist/designers made me realize true value of receiving feedback outside of educational environment; without their help and feedback, this virtual metaverse platform would have been missing a lot of necessary frames that are needed for smooth user flow. In the near future, I would like to further expand this project as multi-user VR platform and metaverse for creative people.
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© 2024 Angela Nam