Augmented/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) is still a fragmented space to design for due to the rapidly evolving hardware, the interdisciplinarity of teams, and a lack of standards and best practices. We interviewed 26 professional AR/VR designers and developers to shed light on their tasks, approaches, tools, and challenges. Based on their work and the artifacts they generated, we found that AR/VR application creators fulfll four roles: concept developers, interaction designers, content authors, and technical developers. One person often incorporates multiple roles and faces a variety of challenges during the design process from the initial contextual analysis to the deployment. From analysis of their tool sets, methods, and artifacts, we describe critical key challenges. Finally, we discuss the importance of prototyping for the communication in AR/VR development teams and highlight design implications for future tools to create a more usable AR/VR tool chain. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Collaboration in software development; • Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI); Interaction techniques.

Over the last decades, different kinds of design guides have been created to maintain consistency and usability in interactive system development. However, in the case of spatial applications, practitioners from research and industry either have difficulty finding them or perceive such guides as lacking relevance, practicability, and applicability. This paper presents the current state of scientific research and industry practice by investigating currently used design recommendations for mixed reality (MR) system development. We analyzed and compared 875 design recommendations for MR applications elicited from 89 scientific papers and documentation from six industry practitioners in a literature review. In doing so, we identified differences regarding four key topics: Focus on unique MR design challenges, abstraction regarding devices and ecosystems, level of detail and abstraction of content, and covered topics. Based on that, we contribute to the MR design research by providing three factors for perceived irrelevance and six main implications for design recommendations that are applicable in scientific and industry practice. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → User interface design; Mixed / augmented reality.

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Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPA) are advertised as reliable companions in the everyday life to simplify household tasks. Due to speech-based usability issues, users struggle to deeply engage with current systems. The capabilities of newer generations of standalone devices are even extended by a display, also to address some weaknesses like memorizing auditive information. So far, it is unclear how the potential of a multimodal experience is realized by designers and appropriated by users. Therefore, we observed 20 participants in a controlled setting, planning a dinner with the help of an audio-visual-based IPA, namely Alexa Echo Show. Our study reveals ambiguous mental models of perceived and experienced device capabilities, leading to confusion. Meanwhile, the additional visual output channel could not counterbalance the weaknesses of voice interaction. Finally, we aim to illustrate users' conceptual understandings of IPAs and provide implications to rethink audiovisual output for voice-frst standalone devices. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Sound-based input / output; Displays and imagers; User studies; Empirical studies in interaction design.