In this video, we're going to talk about XR Designed Thinking. Now, design thinking is actually quite an established method that has been around for many years coming out of the Stanford Design School. It's often applied to innovative product development, and making user experiences if you will. But it's really about a mindset. Building empathy with the users, really focusing on the user and then everything else will follow, that is really the idea. It's more of an approach, and a way of thinking, then it's own method or set of techniques. It actually is associated with common interaction design and user experience design techniques, at least that's the way I think about it. Now, what I want to accomplish here though, is that we are importing that knowledge from design thinking and applying it to XR. There's a couple of things that are quite different, for example when it comes to innovation and problem framing. Because XR is really like this technology that could potentially solve a lot of problems, but it's more like we're throwing that technology and everything, it's like our hammer, as I said previously, our hammer and now you're trying to find all the nails so that you can hit with it. Sometimes you'll be successful and sometimes you're not. Design thinking, is a specific way of framing a problem by really building empathy with your users. Now, your users will not feel like, I need AR or no, I need VR. AR or VR might be the method or the tool, if not the technology, to potentially solve the problem. Now, I want to be very careful, because technology in itself, doesn't actually solve any problems, but it might actually be an enabler, and that's how I want us to think about that. Here I'll give you an overview of the design thinking method. The first step you will empathize, you empathize with your users, you're trying everything to find out about their problems, what are their pain points, and what is currently working for them, what is currently not working for them. You're getting to learn the context and the setting in which current solutions are applied, to really identify shortcomings, and gaps and therefore opportunities. This will help you define the problem. Really, the first three steps to be precise are reading about problem framing, they're not so much about solution finding. You're actually trying to understand the problem, not just the symptoms of the problem, but actually the problem. There are common techniques there, in terms of interviewing, and observing, and doing focus groups, and there are all kinds of standard, let's say a standardized traditional human-computer interaction, and user research techniques. Then we're entering the ideation stage, and the ideation stage as we usually closely tie it with prototyping as well. Ideation really doesn't just happen in your brain or just through discussion, what I'll preach here more or less is like that ideation happens through sketching, and through storyboarding and through wireframing. These are some of the common techniques that I really want you to embrace, when it comes to the ideation stage, and that then actually helps us transition into prototyping. In prototyping, you usually work with paper, and building 3D paper prototypes, I'll show you some examples of this, especially in the exile context, this is really useful. When you have these first prototypes that you can go also from paper to digital, but even just the paper prototypes, you could actually test with users. Keep in mind that the nature of the prototype really also somehow frames the feedback, that you will get. For example, if you have something that looks very low fidelity, initial stage, sketchy if you want, you probably get very different feedback, not so much about the colors, but maybe more about the flow, and maybe the organization roughly of your interfaces, and this is a very important thing to keep in mind. You don't want your prototypes to look too polished, because it may also, there's this observation, that if something looks too finished, it's close to being done, then your testers might be reluctant to provide more feedback because they anticipate a much higher cost involved in making changes, and now that's an interesting aspect as well. With this testing phase concluded, although testing to be honest never really finishes, cause you go on, and implement. Here when we talk about implementation, I usually think of prototypes as something we're implementing a prototype and we're testing that prototype, and then we're doing potentially another iteration, here this idea of implementation really then you're going to use the technologies. In our case we would actually go, and try things out with XR devices directly. Now, I'll introduce you to methods that allow you to actually use extra devices also in the prototyping and ideation stages even, for example through immersive prototyping, where you actually create interfaces directly on an extra device can concurrently testing it as they're designing. That is a really cool thing that you can do, that is almost unique to XR. Now that we have established this six-step method with the empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test and implement steps; let's look at some of the issues when it comes to XR in each of these steps. Now I said, a common way to empathize is to interview users and to observe users and understand their challenges and what are the pain points. Now, the problem with XR is that XR is usually not already a solution. If you're refining an existing XR prototype, yes, then maybe you can observe how users use it; but if you're looking at an existing problem and you're trying to bring in XR as a potentially new solution, you can't really observe the users directly. It's very different from web-based and mobile-based design where the users really work with this technology on a daily basis. XR is really not like that. I don't know a lot of people that actually use VR on a daily basis or AR on a daily basis and certainly not to achieve anything productive. We are moving into meeting scenarios and carrying out meetings in XRs and AR or VR but we don't really work yet; at least not yet, in these kinds of virtual spaces with virtual offices. If we did, then the more traditional techniques of observation, interviewing and shadowing and doing field studies. But the reality here at the moment is, that you cannot really observe the issues directly as they happen with XR. In the definition phase, to me it's very important that you don't just look at the problem or don't just look at the symptoms of the problem and then trying whatever it takes to press that problem into an AR or VR solution. Many of us have a preference. Somebody maybe likes VR more than AR and then they're trying to solve everything with VR, or solve everything with AR. For me, it's very important that we keep an open mind. Don't just commit to AR or VR. It might very well be, that after going through these initial need-finding strategies, that you figure out that neither AR nor VR is actually a solution. That would actually be a very good result. It could avoid a lot of cost and save you a lot of time and energy. As we're moving into the ideation stage, what is very, very important to me here and I really say this to my students all the time, is that when you ideate and you already have experience, for example, using devices like HoloLens; and you know of all the technical limitations of these devices. For example the frequency with which they scan the environment; although they can be configured or the accuracy with which they can represent the environment or the lack of semantics that we have. It's really hard to detect objects reliably. Objects we've never seen before and that the computer knows that this is this or that object. If you walk into a design or an ideation session with these technical constraints in mind, you're really limiting the ideation. You're basically biased and you really do want to avoid that. I really like working with a diverse set of teams in these ideation settings where some of the students; often that I worked with or other kinds of practitioners or other faculty professors, where they have actually limited experience with XR. Where they're thinking of it as being something that is magical and super powerful because it doesn't hold them back in their ideation and I think that is really important when it comes to design thinking for XR. Now as we're entering the prototyping stage, when I work with students and we have these design concept ideas, we have ideated, we have already like storyboards and wire frames and now maybe we're moving already from paper to digital. Then one of the things, there's a tendency to do the basic things. The things that you know already, to do them digitally. For example, a login screen. I always tease my students, "Don't do the login screen." First of all, all login screens look more or less the same. What's the point of prototyping those digitally? You won't learn a lot more. What you should do instead is really focus on the unknown unknowns. There might be actually a lot of gaps in your current design idea and you're design concept and you use prototyping to really figure out how to fill those gaps. That's the best way to approach it. The prototyping doesn't need to happen in a complete prototype way. It can be the more like a horizontal prototype, was more like the facade. You're trying to figure out the whole front-end and all the options shown to the user. If you're taking this approach, then you are less focused on the vertical, on the technology, and more focused on figuring out the entire user-facing parts of the interface and ultimately fill all the gaps. But really even then, don't start with the known interface parts and then just do them digitally. I mean, maybe you can do this for warm-up. But what you should really focus on, is the things that you don't know yet how they would materialize in the user interface, for example. Focus on those things as you're prototyping your XR experience. Then when it comes to testing, testing is very, very interesting because as we're using XR, we could actually use XR technologies to fill the gaps. Think of an interface that is nearly complete, but then you want something magical to appear and you don't know yet how to prototype it. Now, you could do this in a video prototypes through some overlays using some video editing software. You may also use some more advanced AR or VR tools to really bring in some of these overlays. I want you to think of exile technologies to also fill the gaps in your exile prototypes. This is a very innovative use of using extra technologies to support prototyping and testing. The idea in this testing phase, is to simulate an almost complete user experience, to simulate the experience of working prototype where everything has been implemented. You can fill these gaps. If you don't have a full prototype implemented, you can fill these gaps using humans as wizards. This idea of the Wizard of Oz to really fill the gaps. Wizard of Oz prototyping and testing, is a really key idea that I think also makes a lot of sense in XR. For example, one of the things I have done, is jumping into a VR experience. I was like more or less invisible to the VR user and I could move things in VR to produce like a virtual, a heads up display to them. They thought that all of these screens are animated and they're moving and this interfaces responsive. There's personal assistant very understands me. But in fact, I was actually there in the background as a wizard and where the computer to really fill in the gaps. I think that is a very cool way of simulating a more complete prototype that we then can test that way. It could be a really intelligent system that we're prototyping that understands all gestures and speech commands. In this testing phase, to really stimulate the almost final user experience, even though we haven't fully implemented the system yet. Finally, when it comes to implementation, I think one of the common mistakes here is that many of us are very familiar with one tools. For example, unity or unreal. Some of us may know both, but then we don't actually consider other options and we tried to do everything with these tools because we think unity or unreal is the best tool. Now the point I want to make here, is that you should use the best suited tool. For example, an early stage prototype. We really don't have to run and go into unreal and use all their high ends rendering capabilities. You'd also don't need to jump into unity to get started. Now, you can choose other prototyping tools, maybe more like geared towards immersive prototyping. Really have a variety of options and don't be afraid, even though it's not always easy to transition between some of these tools. Having this flexibility in terms of tools and knowing a variety of tools, is really actually a strength. That would enrich the way you think about the problem. Not just with this one tool, but from multiple different perspectives.
