XR Initiative

Center for Academic Innovation at The University of Michigan

Designing Foundational UX for VR Applications

XR Initiative

The XR (Extended Reality) Initiative at the University of Michigan is a program focused on developing and applying virtual, augmented, and mixed reality technologies in teaching, learning, and research. The team delivers solutions for XR-based course materials, training and technology for faculty and students, and collaborates with industry partners to advance the development of XR Technologies.

Above are some of the VR Applications the team has launched

Overview

As UX designer at the XR Initiative, I identified opportunities to enhance the overall user experience and established a strong foundation for future UX work and team development.
In addition to consulting on current and new VR projects, I developed a XR design guide and delivered a practical XR toolkit for developers, resulting in improved design maturity, increased scalability of solutions, streamlined workload for designers and developers, and implementation of a culture of documentation, onboarding, and resource management.

The XR Initiative is composed of an agile group of Engineers, Developers, and Product. As a UX Designer, I worked closely with the team, wearing multiple hats with a hands on approach (UX, UI, Development, Branding).

Learn more about the XR Initiative here.

Duration: 2021 - 2022

My Role: UX Designer, Researcher

Skills: UX Design, UX research & testing, design systems/libraries, cross-functional collaboration, branding

Tools: Figma, Unreal Engine, Adobe Suite

Designing for XR:

Spatial Interactions Call for New Design Standards

Upon joining the team, I recognized a challenge with multiple projects utilizing disparate branding and assets created from scratch in Unreal Engine, causing redundancies, inefficiencies, and a lack of consistency.

In response, I devised a solution by developing a streamlined design system/library for both developers and designers to align and utilize as a definitive source of truth for all future projects, significantly reducing inefficiencies and improving consistency across the board.

View the full XRI Design Guide here.

To standardize our design language, I set out to build a design library in Figma, and created custom components 1:1 in Unreal Engine. This library helped to streamline our visual design and speed up production.

The vision was to build a system both in Figma and in UE (Unreal Engine) that allows developers to quickly create UI for our VR applications. I drew inspiration from the Hololens’ MRTK library (supporting both figma and 3D assets).