Designing therapy. In VR.
With FarBridge as the development partners, I was in charge of designing the UX for Reality Based Wellness - an app meant to deliver clinical therapeutic video content to mobile, desktop, and most importantly, VR headsets.
Approach
Through interviews with the client team and reviewing their past research, we came up with a list of epics and user stories that needed to be covered in the first prototype. I then turned these stories into wireframes in Sketch. Then we tested the wireframes as clickable prototypes using Marvel to get usability feedback.
VR Design
The VR experience was the headliner experience. It was the premier way to view the content, but unfortunately, the hardest way to select content and create an account.
Our solution was keep the VR experienced as focused as possible on viewing content. Account creation would be done on your phone, then you’d log in on the headset with a one-time passcode and view the content.
Another challenging aspect of designing in VR is the novelty of the affordances for most people. Thanks to my work designing mobile apps for kids, I’m used to keeping buttons big and obvious.
When you’re working with a laser-pointer-like clicker as in VR, you can’t scroll or swipe, you need big chunky buttons to navigate lists.
Mobile & Desktop Design
I wanted to keep the mobile and desktop designs as simple and familiar as possible. Netflix, InsightTimer, and Liberate were points of reference in the design.
The content was divided into a few categories, but not too many - we found ~5 to be the sweet spot.
Besides viewing content, the other main feature we wanted to emphasize was showing your login code for VR. Since VR was a selling point for the corporate program and a much more effective way, clinically-speaking, to view the content, we wanted to encourage that behavior as much as possible.
Lastly, we made sure to allow people to send feedback to the team from every video. We wanted this to be as easy as possible. With such sensitive subject material as therapy, this is doubly important. It can be hard enough even with a therapist in the room so I wanted to make sure that option was present digitally as well.
