A couple of weeks ago I was provoked a bit by a video a LinkedIn contact shared, where a person advises against jumping into game engine software to start “designing”:
[This video link may or may not work - I suspect you need to be logged into LinkedIn]
The rationale of the argument is that if one chooses that route, then one quickly descends into honing rounded corners into the 3D assets and whatever.
While I get where the comment comes from, I find it unfortunate if someone shies away from engaging with said software because of a generalised anecdote of what can happen rather what should happen.
Where does the design start and end?
So what are actually talking about here? The advice referred to above highlights how we come to the term ‘design’ from a number of different angles. Depending on your background, you place ‘design’ somewhere on a spectrum from visual outlook to physical form to interaction.
Part of the confusion might have to do with what is a sketch and what is a prototype. In his classic opus Sketching User Experiences Bill Buxton provides a useful shorthand for this:
What happens in the anecdote/video comment in the beginning is that the imagined designer starts to blur the boundaries, not keeping a sketch a sketch, and starting to prescribe its details. While I do think you can sketch just fine in Unity and Unreal, let’s talk about what sketching designs for XR may mean.
Paper is a great medium - for 2D
There is a practical catch in this. Don’t get me wrong, I love technical drawings and sketches that communicate a design idea (Buxton’s book is full of lovely stuff). But with XR, the loss of explanatory power is directly proportional to the spatial complexity of the experience being sketched.
The thing is, perspectival drawing does not capture spatial interaction considerations adequately. You always lose the sense of spatial relations - in particular their meaningful details - in one way or another. Especially regarding how the user is situated in the space and the embodied interactions that come with it.
This is the same rationale architects have used when arguing for multi-sensory thinking and a move away from looking at models on a screen.
It’s also impractical to sketch UX sequences or scenarios on paper in life-size scale, if that’s what you need to act out the sequence.
One can do bodystorming where the team acts out the situation, but if the user is meant to interact with anything other than other people in the space - e.g. locations or objects - I’d say the findings are indicative at best. The bodystorming experiment might be critical for establishing shared understanding within the team through debating the concept, though.
Cardboard is an adequate 3D substrate
Enter “brown-boxing”: using cardboard and other materials and props to physically construct a low-cost prototype. I love the idea, and have practiced it (see photo below), and it can save time and resources. Besides cardboard, play dough, legos, etc can work. Pieces of string can be used to hang things in space to emulate floating 3D assets and ergonomics in interacting with them.
However, brown-boxing outputs tend to lend themselves to more efficient communication in an early concept phase and don’t scale in their usefulness for the remainder of the project.
While one can mitigate early false assumptions with such crafting, “grey-boxing” i.e. quickly prototyping in-engine with placeholder assets is what ultimately validates the brown-boxing findings for the platform of choice - e.g. how the brown-boxed findings play out with a specific headset and its controllers or interaction schemas.
But how do you figure out what to brown-box? Just scissor away? You can do it, but that’s where sketching for XR becomes useful.
Next week: How to sketch for XR
My previous post on prototyping touch-free interfaces refers to such practices, but it is my hands-on lab on the topic in SIGGRAPH2020 on Friday August 28th that introduces one particular approach in detail. I will post a summary of how that approach came to be next week (update: here it is!)
Or, why not attend if you have a chance - Siggraph is full of great content, with live sessions next week and on-demand content until the end of October!
Thanks & stay safe,
Aki