Are you ready for your team’s first mixed reality project? Four questions for product leaders
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With Apple’s new mixed reality headset expected to be revealed at WWDC in a few days, many product leaders will be tasked with figuring out what that means for their products and services.
If you’re one of them, you might be expecting your existing product design toolkit to readily adapt to the needs of mixed reality (MR¹). But impactful design for MR will require your processes and tools to evolve.
To give you a head start on the changes you’ll need to make, here are four questions you can start thinking about today:
How will you help your team understand the devices they’re designing for?
How will you help your team understand users that can most benefit from MR?
How will you help your team vet the business value of new MR use cases?
How will you provide your team with the tools they need for in situ user research?
These questions come out of my decade-plus experience researching and developing business cases for emerging technologies, from 3D television to HoloLens. By considering these questions now, you’ll have an advantage over teams that are treating mixed reality like traditional product design.
Question 1: How will you help your team understand the devices they’re designing for?
For the past four decades, software professionals have been primarily designing for devices with flat screens. This means your team of designers, product managers, etc., has always had certain assumptions they could carry with them as they moved from designing for desktop applications, to web, to mobile, and even to tiny-screened devices like smart watches.
But with the advent of mixed reality, many of those assumptions no longer apply. Mixed reality design brings new questions about what it means for these devices to sense, make sense of, and embed information in a user’s environment. Your team will also have to account for the user’s physical experience like never before. Instead of focusing predominantly on familiar concepts like cognitive load, suddenly they’ll need to consider things like cue conflict, physical fatigue from repeated gestures, and the impact of individual differences such as height and gender.
To design effectively, your team will almost certainly need help understanding MR’s capabilities, as well as what it means to design for and around human bodies.
Facilitating this ramp-up can take many forms. Are there technical experts, such as technical leads or engineering managers at your company, that you could partner with? What about human factors experts (their titles often include the terms “human factors” or possibly “ergonomics”)?
Can you build extra time into your roadmap for learning and experimentation (some teams I’ve worked with refer to this as a “pre-concept phase,” others a “spike”)? And what approaches can you take to give your team opportunities to try out mixed reality themselves?
Question 2: How will you help your team understand users that can most benefit from MR, rather than users who are simply familiar to them?
When Microsoft’s HoloLens device first launched, many tech professionals immediately envisioned extended desktops for office workers as a primary use case. And why not? If you work in an office (and your users all work in offices), then you’re surrounded by people with second and even third monitors. Why not give them even more real estate?
But reality didn’t match expectation. The extended-desktop apps that launched in the months and years that followed never got any traction. It turned out that people who work at desks didn’t actually need infinite-scrolling spreadsheets, and that the friction of putting on a headset outweighed the benefits.
Instead, we’re learning that mixed reality has the biggest impact for workers with physical workflows – people like field technicians, nurses, and manufacturing line workers. Because mixed reality is at its best when it’s helping people to navigate the objects and environment around them (which doesn’t come into play much when you’re sitting at a desk!).
If your team is like most teams in tech, they’re probably not accustomed to considering users with physical workflows. As they’re conducting customer discovery and looking for pain points, they may not think to include people who don’t work at desks. They may not even have any idea where to find them.
As a leader, you can have an immediate impact simply by reminding your team to look beyond their typical user base, and by pointing to the enterprise use cases of companies like Microsoft and Magic Leap.
Could you go further by giving your team time and space to consider the assumptions they may be making about the potential users of their mixed reality applications (as part of your new pre-concept phase perhaps?)?
Longer term, are there processes you could introduce to ensure your team is actively considering novel users? Are there partnerships or pipelines you could create to give them access to workers with physical workflows (perhaps by reaching out to local businesses, professional organizations, or unions)? And can you start exploring B2B agreements that would enable your team to observe these workers in the workplace?
Question 3: How will you help your team vet the business value of new MR use cases?
When I transitioned onto my first mixed reality project, I expected that the biggest challenge would be creating new types of interactions for information embedded in the user’s environment. I was wrong!
Your team will probably have similar expectations to mine. As they embark on their first mixed reality project, they may be anticipating a number of design challenges–such as, how do you direct attention in 360-degree space? And these can be perplexing questions. But most smart, motivated teams will be able to come up with adequate–even innovative–solutions.
What most teams are unprepared for is the business challenges that come with MR.
MR has plenty of skeptics in the press (and probably in your own leadership team) with good reason. The devices are expensive and unproven, and customers are hesitant to heavily invest in a new platform without a significant expected return. If you can’t solve expensive business problems for your customers, it will be that much harder to get buy-in from executives at your own company who make go/no-go project and team funding decisions.
What will convince business decision-makers to invest in the upfront and continuing costs of mixed reality is significant impact to their bottom line. This means your team needs to understand your customers’ businesses at the level of their balance sheets, so that they can concretely quantify how new mixed reality applications will help them increase revenue or reduce costs.
Being able to articulate business value in product design, generally, is a hot topic these days as more and more teams struggle to retain resources amid budget cuts. Building up this skill on your team for MR should have far-reaching benefits in helping them articulate the business value of other design work.
Where is your team currently in terms of their ability to quantify the business impact of product design decisions? How can you help them develop this skill further? Is there training or partnering (such as with a business analyst) that you could leverage to help them bring a business economics lens into their design decision-making for MR projects?
Question 4: How will you provide your team with the tools they need for in situ user research?
While ROI is often the major factor in a business’ initial MR purchase decision, the other key decision-maker is the person wearing the device. It doesn’t matter how much the business has spent–workers will resist using mixed reality if it doesn’t make their job faster, easier, or more comfortable each day.
It’s important to realize that many people with physical workflows–lab technicians, warehouse pickers, etc.–have demanding schedules that require them to complete high numbers of tasks on strictly monitored timelines. Many are highly trained and highly efficient. In some cases, failing to meet quotas can result in their being fired. They certainly don’t have time to troubleshoot an unfamiliar device.
Designing an app or service that will help–not hurt–these kinds of workers requires deeply understanding their physical workflows and the context they occur in. Unfortunately, there is no way to do that without some measure of physical presence. This means that your team will probably need to supplement remote customer discovery and validation methods–like online interviews and usability tests–with on-site methods–like contextual inquiry and in situ prototype testing.
By being onsite with users you may also realize that there are environmental factors you never would have thought to ask about in a remote interview–such as a lack of cell phone connectivity, bulky PPE, or hazards such as splash zones for liquids. Trying to learn about these factors remotely is, at best, unreliable and, at worst, dangerous for your end-users.
As a leader, how can you prepare your team to begin conducting more observational and on-site research? Do you have people on your team who are skilled at these methods? If not, is there training or third-party help you can leverage? And what can you do now to start socializing the need for these types of methods with stakeholders who may be accustomed to doing user research entirely remotely?
It’s okay not to have all the answers today
What most people get wrong about their first mixed reality project is thinking that their existing product design toolkit will easily adapt to the needs of this new type of interface. But impactful design for mixed reality will require your process to evolve.
This evolution doesn’t happen overnight, but, to recap, here are the four questions you can start thinking about today:
How will you help your team understand the devices they’re designing for?
How will you help your team understand users that can most benefit from MR?
How will you help your team vet the business value of new MR use cases?
How will you provide your team with the tools they need for in situ user research?
If this sounds daunting, the good news is that everyone is in the same boat. Mixed reality is a new paradigm, and most product and design teams are still fumbling in the dark. By considering these questions now, you will be miles ahead by the time it actually counts.
👋 I’m Llewyn Paine, Ph.D., principal at Llewyn Paine Consulting, where I specialize in helping innovation leaders identify new markets, refine their value proposition, and build evidence-driven design and research practices.
🤖 If you want to learn more about human-centered technical audits for emerging technology (Question 1), I talk about them in more detail in my 2021 Austin Startup Week talk.
🖍️ If you want to learn more about updating your overall design process for physical-digital technologies such as MR, check out my Austin Design Week talk.
💬 If you’d like to connect about your own specific project, team, or question, you can grab 30 minutes on my calendar.
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Footnote
I’m using the term “mixed reality” in this post because this seems to be the dominant language in current press coverage, but Apple is expected to be using the term “extended reality” or “XR,” based on its “xrOS” trademarks. Either way, the principles in this post should apply equally to design for all AR/VR-type devices.