UX Design for XR Experiences: Creating interactions in three dimensions

Abstract

UX Design has been consolidated over the last thirty years around the development of interfaces for digital technologies such as computers and smartphones. Techniques, heuristics, and concepts created for the development of interfaces by pioneers like Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen (Norman, 1998; Nielsen, 2024), and Robert Reimann (Reimann et al. 2014), have evolved towards experiences related to the devices mentioned above. The emergence of the Extended Reality (XR) market (Hillmann, 2021) has led designers to encounter the limits of processes and conceptualization techniques aimed at 2D technologies. As an emerging technology, XR is a great promise in various areas such as education, health, industry, and entertainment (Chuah, 2018). XR devices are in a phase of transformation and experimentation where fundamental UX definitions, such as affordance, usability, interactions, and other topics, are not yet consolidated. There is a lack of UX design processes (Santos et al. 2024) that consider intrinsic aspects like users' spatial behaviors, the use of spatial dimensions for object manipulation, and the development of contextualized interactions for user experiences. The article discusses the limitations identified by designers and researchers in the development of XR applications and the strategies created by them to build interactions and 3D interfaces based on the study of two research cases. Conclusively, the article seeks to raise the debate about updating and renewing UX design processes considering the consolidation of new technological platforms, such as extended reality devices, while sharing with the academic audience some successful explorations carried out at our institute.

Keywords: User Experience, Extended Reality, Discovery, Exploratory Research

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007547