How to sketch for XR

Part 3: Online hands-on workshop on spatial design

On Friday August 28th, 2020, I delivered a 60-minute hands-on class at SIGGRAPH 2020. The session turned out to be a success, with around 90 attendees in the Zoom call and four volunteers spontaneously participating in the exercises.

I’ll keep this post short and let a few screenshots tell the story.

Exercise 1: Ideating the spatial browser as a multi-sensory XR application

The screenshot above shows the results of the first exercise that was about combining browser features and multisensory ways to interact with them. This exercise serves as a warm-up ideation exercise for the actual sketching.

Exercise 2: Refining ideas via sketching and making collages

Based on the results of the first, ideation exercise, participants picked an idea or two and started fleshing it out into a visual format. After the second exercise, the volunteers shared thoughts on their process of coming up with the sketches.

Wrap-up: Contextualising into on-going work

To close out the session, I pointed out some useful resources from people at Microsoft, Magic Leap, and Google that can be used to critique and further develop the spatial interaction concepts towards prototyping. 

Reflection

There was a Q & A session afterwards with good questions and productive discussion around online tools, such as Mural, and the necessity of keeping the fundamentals of interaction design at hand, such as accessibility and prototyping, even if with XR we are working with technologies where some of the conventions from previous media do not necessarily translate 1:1.

There was also a particular question about how to balance the goal of quickly visualising ideas with, upon starting prototyping, discovering many details that the sketches did not take into account. For example, as an attendee pointed out a sketch might present an idea of how tabs in a spatial browser could manifest in 3D space but through prototyping, the question of how to close or make those tabs disappear might be identified as a key blocker for the UX. 

I fully sympathise with the question and believe that details like those are crucial in figuring out good design - with the sketching / collage approach, my premise is that it helps to get to those problems faster by visualising and specifying the prototype requirements as a starting point. It helps to trigger the follow-up questions about the important details. 

The visual communication is key also because especially in an old-school, verbally described use case documentation, at least in my experience, expressing and documenting complex interactive things takes a lot of time. Therefore a quickly produced visual idea - a sketch or a collage - might reduce that communication overhead by magnitudes and function as a team communication tool much more efficiently. 

Getting into the routine of spatial sketching is key to leverage the benefits of the approach.

Feel free to reach out if you are interested in trying out the workshop format. If you got thus far, you are rewarded with a link to the Mural itself to have a peek!

Thanks & stay safe,

Aki