UX Researcher and Designer
Winter 2021 - Summer 2021
Working with Moonbeam, a company building a Virtual Reality (VR) workspace, my team explored the question:
"How might we support ideation for remote collaboration in VR?"
During the two quarters of this Senior Capstone Project, I worked with two Electrical Engineering students to create a method of creating collaborative flowcharts within Moonbeam’s program. Upon graduation, I continued working with Moonbeam as a summer internship where I improved the UX Design of their application.
FINAL DELIVERABLES
Low fidelity deliverable.
We designed and built a tool for creating flowcharts collaboratively within the Moonbeam workspace. Features of our prototype include tools to create notes, map them to each other, and even share reactions to the notes.This supports users’ abilities to generate ideas and to collect as well as provide feedback in VR.
RESEARCH
Before realizing Moonbeam lacked a method of collaborative ideation, our objective had been to discover any gaps in Moonbeam’s features compared to other VR workspace applications in support of competitiveness of Moonbeam’s application. To do this, I lead my team members through User Experience Research (UXR) methods in conducting a competitive analysis, interviews, and analyzing our findings.
competitive analysis
Alternative VR workspace applications are already available. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the value of VR workplaces came to light: it was a novel way to interact remotely with coworkers. Moonbeam was still in the process of building out their features, and to ensure they had a competitive edge in this industry, my group conducted a competitive analysis of other VR applications. Specifically, we researched what features other applications had, space designs, interfaces, and how user feedback.
We tested the applications ourselves, checking off common features and noting what other features they included. Additionally, we looked at different reviews to see what users found most effective about their designs.
Examples of other VR workspaces.
interviews
To learn what teams wanted in remote ideation interactions, I interviewed Moonbeam employees. Moonbeam employees were included in the target user group because they were a team of co-workers collaborating around the development of Moonbeam. Additionally, they were working remotely and needed to rely on digital tools of co-working, or working together remotely.
findings
I created an affinity diagram of the data I gathered through interviews, resulting in two dominant interests:
Share Ideas. Users need to be able to share ideas effectively, so that it is easy for the rest of the team to understand.
“The whole idea of [diagramming] is to get the thought out of your head into a metaphor that makes sense across the group and start building that.”
Actively Collaborate. Users need a way to collaborate and get everyone involved.
“That back and forth is really where creativity happens.”
DESIGN
Based on the competitive analysis and our interviews, we identified the gap that Moonbeam lacked a way to create charts and diagrams, as well the need for a feature to support ideation, we decided to create an Ideation feature where users could create functional diagrams within Moonbeam.
ideation
A challenge in ideating what diagramming in a virtual world would look like was determining the scope of supporting individual experiences or multi-user experiences. We wanted to support both individual ideation and collaborative ideation. Another question we grappled with was how to take advantage of the possibilities of immersion in ideation. Below are some sketches I did to support visualizing different ways to create an ideation experience in Moonbeam.
high fidelity mockup
We decided to create a diagramming tool to support ideation in Moonbeam. This tool would be visible to others in the team, and allowed people to come up and actively engage in the diagram creation, adding new ideas and reacting to existing ideas.
High fidelity mockup of prototype.
low fidelity prototype
My team members spent their time learning Unity as I was conducting UXR throughout the first half of the project. Below is the low fidelity prototype they created for this project.
Example of a user interacting with the ideation tool.
Example of ideation tool in Moonbeam.
FUTURE DESIGN PLANS
At the end of the project term, there were still features that would be important to implement. We created a list of recommended features for developers to include as they continue to build upon our final prototype, prioritized in four stages from functional requirements before the feature is ready for users, to what would be nice additions for users to have. Particularly, we would want to offer more ways to edit the diagram, and fun ways for the team to get involved in collaboration and ideation.
High fidelity mockup of a potential activity for ideation.
Ideas of what next steps Moonbeam can implement with the ideation tool.