Storyboards that visually predicts and explores a user's experience with a product.
VR Social Interaction
2020 | Design with Data/UoE | UX Design | Graphic | Rapid Prototyping
overview
The purpose of this project is to develop a new social platform that allows users to use VR as a tool to remotely share immersive memories and experiences with their family and friends.
Traditionally, storytelling is fundamental for human expression, the virtual reality concept has now not only expanded in storytelling in entertainment and communication, but also medicine and therapy.
VR has the potential to improve the communication between people, especially long-distance communication, we therefore looks into theories behind it to discover potential product opportunities, including history of VR and the triangular inspiration; research and practice process and reactions after experiments.
Traditionally, storytelling is fundamental for human expression, the virtual reality concept has now not only expanded in storytelling in entertainment and communication, but also medicine and therapy.
VR has the potential to improve the communication between people, especially long-distance communication, we therefore looks into theories behind it to discover potential product opportunities, including history of VR and the triangular inspiration; research and practice process and reactions after experiments.
target users
International students who studies abroad, they can constantly feel lonely, homesick or depressed, especially during the COVID-19 situation. A product that brings people together is more necessary than ever.
Research & Practice
To achieve the practice, we divided our design thinking process into fours spaces - Discover, Define, Ideate and Design.
This design thinking process is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps.
This design thinking process is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps.
100 ideas brainstorming session
found out the 3 areas that interest us all
• Discover
The firrst space of the design thinking is to discover our interests, this space was moved into a structured brainstorming workshop by generating hundreds of ideas from each of us.
We came up with three disciplines which include our common interests, they which were Human factor, Interactive and Improvement.
• Define
The empathy maps were created for a general understanding of the concept - these broad empathy maps quickly lead us to the user personas, because they were not based on any specific user scenario. We, therefore, created three fictional characters, which were based on our own experiences and the related research. These personas represent the different user types that might similarly use our prototype and help us understand the future target users' needs and goals.
• Ideate
At this stage we developed the storyboard and user journey in order to visually predict and explore the user's experience with our future prototype. The character, Nana, was created to represent a sociable person who enjoys the latest social media and loves to share her life with her fans. This storyboard aimed to illustrate the background story of this certain personality and the scenario, in which a person chooses to use the platform to communicate and interact with the others. The user journey maps help us to figure out the pain points of the existing social media, and what would be our design opportunities.
• Design
The final space of the design thinking process is design, which concretizes our concept to an actual product. We wanted our users to be able to produce content for our social platform easily, like people nowadays can take a picture with their phone camera at any point.
After determining the main functions and the basic structure of our app, we sketched wireframes in Adobe XD.
Key pages include: 1. A video album page, in which users can see all their 360-degree videos, which are displayed in reverse chronological order. 2. A video recording page, in which users can shoot 360-degree videos and add filters to them. 3. A dialog page, in which users can share their instant videos to contacts as well as texts or images 4. A video player page, in which users can click on the VR icon at the bottom right to switch to the VR dedicated viewing page.
