Lessons learnt in creating Virtual Reality UX Design course-Part 1

This article presents my learning from Designing and conducting a full fledged course on Designing for Virtual Reality.

Breaking the learning in 2 parts. In first part I present my learning of designing a course curriculum and it’s format. The second part presents my learning specific to Virtual Reality domain.

Part 1 — How to design a curriculum for Virtual Reality

By no means am an academician, but this course made me one. Learning from my own mistakes, needs and reading what’s going around in the VR domain guided the content of this course.

Before this, I conducted workshops teaching enthusiasts about VR domain, tools, Design principles and shared personal lessons. So was considered an expert in this domain. You may think then creating this course would have been piece of cake! Well it wasn’t easy at all and made me think at the content in totally different way. But it definitely was a rewarding experience, as it now has got most of the pieces of puzzle in place.

However, I do wish I knew what I was in for before teaching and guiding the future VR Designers. Each task has a learning curve, so did this for me. There are lessons for myself and every other academy that wants to create a learning material for the future of Design.

Lesson №1 — Don’t build a checklist curriculum

The mistake I did initially was to collate all that I thought is needed for the participants and jot them down as per topics which were technical.

There are many out there which have bullet list of what you’ll learn. But ultimately what matters is the output that you give. On the course you might excel at some of the topics but your final deliverable will decide your overall learning.

What I think will make better sense was to create an interactive story that trainees will participate in while they get to learn by hands on practice. So this can be done by project first approach then topic first.

Being stuck while learning something new is part of the process, but that should not derail the entire project. This is like on job training, which becomes one of the best ways of learning.

№2 — Planned failure

I made mistake of not anticipating mistakes that can be made by participants. Doesn’t mean that it broke the link. It went fantastic. They learn more and better when they made mistakes and I had to explain them. However, because of this format the sessions went longer and we had to miss or offload many portions to next session leading to delays.

So planning on what all learning mistakes they can made during the session or intentionally planning the session so that they make mistake and I teach the concepts will keep the session timeline under control.

Mandatory Experimentation and failure should be part of the story. Messing up is mandatory. Unless you do, you won’t learn how it works. So a planned failure will also help trainees to know what can possibly go wrong in actual projects.

№3 —Serve Half baked project to work on

Well they are not ready to start from scratch everytime in a short duration. Initial handholding will get them jumpstart. Half baked projects work wonders as all the mundane things will be taken care of and they get a good starting point.

№4 — KISS, Keep it Simple and Stupid

4 years of work in VR with Unity has lots and lots of idea brimming in head. So I planned for a big project. However, I realized half way through the course that they are getting familiar with the medium and tool. They are taking baby steps. So I had to go back in time when I myself started.

№5— Inspirations

Showing unrelated works which were collection of bad and good lead to confusion of what

I made mistake of gathering the inspirations from internet and some from my own work set and they the final outcome

These can be work done by some prominent designers in the industry. Or industry case studies or talk by somebody having good experience working in industry. Either of this will pump up the spirits of learners. The inspiration then act as North star for the learners and can help them plan on how to reach the level of expertise represented by the work.

Lesson №5 — Collaborative effort

I observed that when participants were working in silos the quality of output suffered from their own limitations. While working in a team they produced much better results.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts — Aristotle

It is important as a tutor to understand the strength of every individual and team them up to have complementary skills to have good collective output. One more thing to understand is that when people with different skill set and mindset meet, they need to be aligned to a common goal. The mistake I made was that I left it up to participants to decide what they to make. Giving a common direction and clear cut goal would have helped them make lesser mistakes individually before arriving at the solution. The power of VR is in having social collaboration, which as a designer need to be experienced while working on project first.

A 8 week course on Designing for Virtual Reality was created last year, as one of my XR consultation assignments. The full outline of course can be found here.