The Email I Send Anyone Who Asks Me How to Get Started With VR Design
I love it when designers ask me about my little corner of the world — one of my passions right now is helping other people figure out how to bridge the gap between traditional 2D design skills and the unique needs of designing in VR.
Since I keep an “open door” policy when it comes to my email inbox, I get a lot of questions from beginners who share with me a sense of burning curiosity: What’s different about designing for VR? Does anything I’ve learned still apply? Do I have the right degree? What do you DO as a VR designer, anyway? These are all great questions (with lengthy answers!), but I would say the most frequent question I get asked is…
“What do I need to learn in order to be a VR designer?”
After answering this question several times for different people, I figured I would repeat the resources I send back in the hopes that those of you who haven’t asked (or don’t know who to ask) will find it helpful.
User-centered design principles
Everything you do in web & mobile still applies in VR. You might already be familiar with this, but I think of UX design as a toolbox with many different tools useful under certain circumstances. Overall, though, the process of design is generally the same:
- Discovery — What problem are you solving and who are you solving it for? What are your requirements/constraints?
- Ideation — Based off the data we gathered, what are some potential solutions for the problem? What are the pros and cons of each one? Why does VR help solve this problem?
- Build it — Prototype your best ideas and then get feedback by putting it in front of real users.
- Iterate — What worked or didn’t work? Why? Did we miss something? Were any of the assumptions we made earlier in this process wrong?
There’s a metaphorical bible of UX design that I highly recommend reading called Designing for the Digital Age. It’s an amazing primer of UX principles written by user experience expert Kim Goodwin. This book will give you a great foundation of all the different components of the user-centered design process I glossed over above. I believe this is the book they use to teach some of the HCDE program up here at the University of Washington.
VR design specifics
This is where things get hairy. Exactly what VR design encompasses, and what our best practices are, isn’t even close to being agreed upon. Despite how up in the air it all is still, I would recommend these two links to get a brief overview of the stuff you end up thinking about as a VR designer:
- Designing for VR: Environments and Interactions
- Get started with VR: user experience design (written by me)
There is The VR Book as well, which provides an overview of VR design specifically. I would recommend reading it after you finish Designing for the Digital Age, if you’re willing to invest the time.
Remember: the overall user-centered design process is still the same in VR. It’s when we start trying to apply the unique capabilities of VR toward our problem — tracked hand-held controllers, feelings of presence that impact memory, 3D audio spacialization — that we have to start thinking about our design solutions differently.
You can think of it like the difference between being able to safely assume that we will probably have a main menu navigation bar at the top of the page (website design), compared to menus in VR: how do people even find and open the menu? What does a menu in VR even look like??
Drawing
I do a ton of sketching in the course of my work: hands, hands pressing or grabbing things, hands holding controllers… just a ton of hands. It’s kind of obnoxious — hands are hard to draw! — but I do it because my sketches are interaction storyboards I use to communicate my design concepts to my product teammates.
You can draw in 2D (pen/paper, tablet) or in 3D (Tilt Brush). If you’re comfortable with modeling, you can even export your Tilt Brush drawings and modify/refine them in a 3D modeling program. Drawing VR environment wireframes natively using VR tools like Tilt Brush is a technique I’ve used in the past, dependent on what I’m working on, but it’s for sure one of the quickest ways you can experience your own design first-hand and start identify the strengths and weaknesses of your ideas as you work.
Regardless of whether you draw in 2D or 3D, other VR designers are definitely doing the same for their VR experiences— Jeff Chang did a lot of sketching throughout his design process while working on “Itadakimasu”.
I don’t think there is any one right way to learn how to draw for the purposes of VR design sketches, so much as you just want to get as much practice as possible. Try to draw the 3D spaces you’re creating and visualize yourself in those spaces while you’re doing it. Which brings us to another important concept…
Thinking in 3D
When we get into interaction and motion design for VR, things take an even sharper and steeper departure from what we’re used to in traditional 2D interfaces. It’s worth taking some time to familiarize yourself with basic industrial design principles, since that area of design concerns itself with how interactions are assisted or made possible by the physical structure and features of the environment and the objects occupying it. A great text for these kinds of topics is a design classic: The Design of Everyday Things.
Familiarity with interior design, architecture, event booth design, environment design, or any other area that relies on an understanding of 3D spacial relationships and how human bodies navigate them is important.
If you want to try your hand at sketching user experiences for VR in a way that takes 3D spacial relationships into account, this is the article for you: Storyboarding in Virtual Reality.
DIY VR
If you want to know more about the tools you need to pick up in order to make your own VR experiences (coding and 3D modeling included!), then you can take a look at these links:
- From Product Design to Virtual Reality
- How to Get a Job in VR (written by me)
Advanced topics
And finally, here are some articles that stab out into the fringes of what we understand about how VR impacts human cognition. To me, this is the good stuff — the weird stuff — that attracts me to VR in the first place:
I hope this list of resources helps you feel more confident about approaching VR design. I also encourage people to ask me questions, tell me about what you’re working on or what you’re interested in! I’m currently taking a break from Twitter, but you can always email me: adrienne@ossovr.com
❤
