How to design an engaging VR app
Design principles for an enjoyable virtual experience
Virtual and mixed reality apps are becoming more and more attractive to businesses and brands, as multi-sensory 360° experiences create a more profound impression on the audience, make complicated things memorable, and increase empathy. This unique characteristic of VR apps is called “immersion” and the feeling it evokes is referred to as “presence”.
As many workflows are moving from physical to virtual, there is a growing need for them to be realistic — we want people to feel comfortable during virtual team collaboration, almost as if they were talking to their colleagues standing at a physical whiteboard. The same is true for any B2B, B2C, or entertainment VR app — if it’s boring or awkward, the user will take their headset off.
For us as designers, it introduces a new set of usability metrics intended to measure user’s presence — user’s situation awareness and ability to control, the realism of the virtual environment, the meaningfulness of the experience, absence of disruptions, consistency of multimodal information, etc.
In this article, I’d like to form a checklist of design principles that help create engaging experiences and make users want to come back.
✅ Prioritise physiological comfort
Comfort and ease of use are essential for any type of UX. Still, it’s particularly critical when designing for VR, as this type of experience impacts more sides of our brain and will cause immediate rejection as soon as things get uncomfortable for any reason.
In other words, comfort is the unsaid expectation if you want to achieve presence.
Elimination of motion sickness
The most common reason for motion sickness in VR is called vection — it occurs when eyes tell us we’re moving while our vestibular system knows we’re perfectly still. To avoid this effect:
- Never turn off head tracking.
- Move linearly, in short bursts.
- Keep the user in control of their movements. Exceptions are special settings, for example, when the viewer is a passenger on a virtual bus. However, even in such cases, allow the user to start the bus ride themselves instead of automatic start.
- Don’t accelerate the camera and maintain a steady frame rate at all times.
Grounding with fixed objects
The need for grounding has been perfectly defined in design guidelines for Google Cardboard:
You can ground the user with virtual cockpits, chairs, or other stationary objects to explain why they are sitting — despite the fact that VR shows them moving. If the user is near a very large virtual object that is moving, they may mistakenly believe that they are moving, as opposed to the large object moving. This may cause discomfort. Avoid this by including more fixed points of reference in the user’s environment.
Gaze based UI
For headsets that support gaze-based events, it can be a subtle and effortless way to navigate through the app. In the example below, when a user looks at a constellation, it activates a hover-state gaze cue and reveals navigational options.
User’s perspective
Placing the point of perspective at the height of the user’s eyes creates better presence, as the viewer becomes part of the scene. On the contrary, placing a user’s perspective above the scene feels implausible, as if the viewer was a hovering observer.
✅ Ensure easy wayfinding
The simplest way to direct the user and avoid disorientation is to place visual cues, such as teleport markers, footprints, or strings of objects that guide the user through space and narrative. At the beginning of the game, place the user in front of the most important item of interest.
However, as users advance through the scenes, the entire 360° field of view isn’t present before their eyes at all times, which means that sometimes they can miss an important object or event. If you can’t reduce the probability of such a situation in a visual way, use sounds to attract the user’s attention to it.
If motion controllers are being utilised, combine sensory stimuli by vibrating one of the controllers in combination with visual or audio cues.
Sometimes the place itself becomes a hint. According to the behaviour settings theory, people tend to follow stereotypical behaviour patterns once they find themselves within a specific setting. For example, if you place a viewer inside a virtual supermarket, most probably, they will intuitively start their experience by grabbing a cart.
If you want to understand the assumptions people have about a certain type of place, it’s best to visit a similar place in the physical world — deconstruct how you’re feeling within that space, and which elements are implying that you have to behave in a certain way.
✅ Provide environmental richness
Spatial storytelling techniques
In VR, just like in computer games, space is the story. Rich VR environments provoke users to fill in plot details on their own, even without any verbal narratives or any characters present in the scene.
Disneyland theme parks are a great source of inspiration for this kind of narrative called spatial storytelling. At Disney, “architects may strive for historic authenticity and recreate historic buildings, take a whimsical approach and exaggerate storybook images”, use visual tricks such as “forced perspective” — all to make spark viewer’s imagination and stimulate fantasy. These concepts of entertainment architecture can be perfectly applied to virtual experiences, too.
Another great example is a game called Monument Valley, the 1st part of which was more setting-based than plot-based, engaging the user with a series of M.C. Escher-like architectural puzzles.
Meaningfulness of experience
In the first 30 seconds of the experience, when the user is deciding whether to take their headset off or stay, it is important to spark their curiosity and capture their attention. To achieve that, make sure there are animated (preferably in a subtle way) cues in your environment from the very first scene of your app. This trick is based on a scientific fact that humans are more attracted to moving objects than still objects in the scene.
Rich content and elements of discovery
Users quickly lose interest in the app once they’ve explored every corner of it. At the same time, not always you have a budget to build a 3D world as entertaining as a theme park. The good news is that storytelling in VR doesn’t have to be setting-focused only. A great example is the products that tap into a database of community-generated content, where the possibilities for discovery are endless; for instance, Google Earth VR or Wander.
Using data from Google StreetView, this app allows one to point at the map and teleport to a place they’ve never seen before or couldn’t even imagine.
✅ Help users feel in control
Personal space
The rise of social VR accelerates discussions around the topic of personal space and safety in virtual reality. According to Robert Sommer, personal space is “an area with invisible boundaries surrounding a person’s body into which intruders may not come.”
Virtual objects and avatars can freely bump into each other, not bound by the limitations of the cultural etiquette we follow in the real world. This may feel uncomfortable for many people actively participating in social VR events. Altspace VR has solved the problem by introducing a “space bubble” tool. The space bubble creates a close barrier around your avatar to prevent others from entering your personal space.
Physical environmental modifiability
As defined by Thomas B. Sheridan, “presence should increase as one’s ability to modify physical objects in that environment increases”. This may be partially explained by the phenomenon of territoriality:
Territoriality leads us to mark, or personalise, our territory, to signify our “ownership”
To meet this need, allow users to adjust the surroundings in a way that’s comfortable to them, or at least make them feel they’re in control of the space. As a minimum, a user expects that they will be able to open doors in a VR environment. Next levels of modifiability could include the ability to re-arrange objects in a room, write on a virtual whiteboard, or construct the entire virtual space to their liking.
Immersion and presence in VR is a vast topic, and this article is only scratching the surface. If you’d like to learn more on the subject, below is the list of amazing articles and videos to check out:
