Company | Poly (Plantronics Inc.) in Santa Cruz, California
Tools | Unity 3D and C#
VR Project Duration | Sept – Oct 4, 2019
Context
Conducting product demos has always been crucial for a company to sell its line of products to potential clients.
“3 years ago, Plantronics(now Poly) tried using Samsung Oculus VR and high-performing audio recording device to emulate real-life product experience for their International clients. Today, with more advanced technology, we wonder how we can evolve from where we started.”
Problem
Poly is looking for an interactive way to sell its Enterprise products to clients all over the world. It is hard to present product functionality and their look and feel in a conference room to an International client because they don’t necessarily have access to the actual product. Poly is looking for an experience that allows the user to directly interact and learn about the product they want to know.
Constraints
The goal is to finish the project within a month. With such a time constraint, we want to keep it simple and focus on the most important features of our latest products when building our VR environment. We did not define the scope clearly at the early stage, not until we were dedicated to showing at least one well-functioning VR product demo in the Oculus headset. We eventually show two Poly products that emulate the products’ functionality in the scene so that the user can play with these products in the first user testing.
My Role
My role is to communicate constantly to the project manager and the multi-media designer who works with me. My job is to build the actual prototype of the VR environment and create interactive actions using Unity and C#. My job is namely figuring out ways to build the features and evaluate how sustainable they are in the product experience.
My Process
How I arrive at this solution starts with determining the parameters and the scope of the project. I first ask the project manager the following questions:
What are some of the things clients care about when interacting/ testing the products?
What are they trying to learn? What are some of the nice-to-haves and what are some of the priorities?
What are things clients don’t necessarily care about but you think is important?
What is the experience you are looking for? What are the competitors doing, have they done something similar?
Internal User Testing
Our final solution is to emulate the actual product experience using VR – the user can interact with the product exactly as if they are using a real one. This prototype has only been tested internally and it is open to continuous iterations.
Things I learned after giving my first user testing:
To simplify the user flow and reduce the user’s cognitive load
Accessibility issues
Remap the flow
The old user flow:
Interact with the first product:
Pick up low cost controller with left hand > turn around to face towards the TV screen > click through the screens on the low cost controller using the tip of the index finger on the right hand > turn around to place the low cost controller on to the table
Interact with the second product:
Press the play button to play the podcast > press the button again to stop it
The revised user flow:
Interact with the first product:
click through the screens on the low cost controller using the tip of the index finger on the right hand > turn around to place the low cost controller on to the table
Interact with the second product:
Press the play button to play the podcast > press the button again to stop it
Final Reflection
A lot of this seems like obvious mistakes. I should have observe how people interact with the low cost controller in the office. There are many potential prospects to this project. It fascinates people immediately due to the fact that it’s such a new technology. Many of my colleagues said this is the coolest thing they have ever seen and some even said they can even use this to evaluate products, prospects we didn’t think of.