- During our July Virtual UX Conference,
Jakob Nielsen held a Q&A session.
In that session, Drew from Singapore asked
what are the potential UX problems
for virtual reality design
and how can we evaluate VR applications?
- Yeah well virtual reality is an,
of course it's a new media form, right?
It's a new computer format and so that gives
its problems in its own right in that users don't know
how to use even the most basic operations.
And I think in, so that's a concern right there,
in addition to the standard concerns
about what features should we have,
how do we support the application,
but we even need to support
people just being able to manipulate the user interface.
And so this is very similar actually to how it was
back in the 1980s when you know,
I did do early usability studies
and we had the first kind of commercially available
graphical user interfaces with things like a mouse
and all of that and so at the time, you know,
Apple actually shipped the Macintosh with a little animation
kind of introduction to how to use a mouse.
But as you know, in any kind of computer training,
some people get it out of the box, they get the training
and other people just get the computer without the training
and so, people would just walk up to a computer
and see the mouse for the first time,
had no idea what to do and actually, you know,
so some of these studies were like,
people will use it like,
oh, this is where I could remote control,
click (mouse clicking)
make something happen.
Or other people would like turn it around.
This was like, back this mouse, which had like a roller ball
so they'd use it, like a track ball.
And you also have these like,
(grunts)
very tentative mouse movements.
So that is what we saw back in the days
and you had to teach people how to use a mouse
before you could even get into starting the other things.
And in VR, you're going to have similar problems
and you actually, many ways going to have worst problems
because manipulating a virtual reality
has many more degrees of freedom or degrees of complexity,
than using a graphical user interface
because typically, you know,
things like scrolling, for example, right?
You have two dimensions of scrolling
and actually for websites, we even like say yes,
scrolling up, down.
Yes. Scrolling up, down.
Scrolling left and right.
That's not so good for websites typically,
so websites is even simpler.
But traditional applications, they do
two dimensions of scrolling, right?
But in VR you have, first of all you have,
your position in that, the world.
That's three dimension of where you are
and then you have your direction of viewing,
which also has three dimensions of freedom.
And so there's six dimensions, total you've got to control
and so that's a vast, additional complication.
And then in addition to that,
you have that there's no real conventions or standards for
how things are represented and what you're going to do
and then, you know, we have our standard usability problems,
which is the application, the tasks,
actually doing something useful
and this is where I would really recommend
significant user testing.
I mean, I always recommend for anything, as, you know,
I always recommend just doing usability studies,
but I think much more so when you're in a new technology
where you have these problems with just basically operating it,
which can trip up completely any otherwise good design.
But then furthermore, there's that question of
is that application even useful at all?
And I really advise, don't just like demo it
or just don't show to people say, "do you like it?"
Because yes these are
kind of cool right now for many people,
but do they really add anything
do they really do anything useful
and useful can be in many ways, I mean,
useful could act to just be that it's fun and enjoyable,
particularly if it's a game, but there could also
be also more kind of enjoyment style applications like
touring a tourist site to think
if you want to go there on a vacation
or touring a house that's for sale
before you go out there, you know,
make your way physically there to see the house.
There are a lot of those types of applications,
campus tours for universities and so forth.
But do they really add anything over,
just a set of a slide show?
And then you have real applications
where you're actually doing something
and they're even more so,
we've got to do this sort of standard usability testing
of giving people tasks.
Actually do something real, discover something,
find something, do something, accomplish something
and then see if people can do it.
And then there's some tweaks in how you run those studies,
compared to a normal study,
for example, that was actually just some research done.
That's shown if you're gonna do a survey to users like
how much do you like this design for example,
on a one to seven scale or something.
It's better to do that as a simulated survey
within the virtual reality
than to have people like take off their goggles
and then have a sheet of paper and they mark, you know,
six, five, three, whatever.
Because that takes them out of the world
and that's sort of distracting to be in, out, in, out.
So even though it's also a little bit here's like
you pop up in the world, here's like like a survey,
while you're like fighting dragons or something but
that's actually better to do.
So there are some tweaks in how you may run to study,
but honestly, the way to run usability studies
with virtual reality, it's like
run any other usability study,
which is particularly, I mean,
first of all, you'll get representative users and so on
and then as I said, give them tasks.
Don't just like play around with this.
That can also be a task. See what you like,
but also actually do something real
and see if people can do it
cause that's when you'll discover
that your controls don't work or your
conceptual model for the application
completely doesn't match what people want to do.