Bridging Designer-User Gap With a Virtual Reality-Based Empathic Design Approach: Contextual Information Details

Abstract

Without shared experiences, empathy gaps between designers and users are difficult to bridge. Advancing Virtual Reality (VR) has shed new light on this regard by enabling designers to simulate and experience their users' living scenarios in a virtual environment (VE). However, implementing VR-based empathetic design approach requires dealing with critical design questions, such as: (1) whether VR operators can develop empathy for unfamiliar user groups solely based on objective experience and (2) whether VR operators can utilize task-irrelevant contextual information in the VEs. To explore these issues, we designed an experiment based on two VEs with varying levels of detail that simulated the scenes viewed by people with red-green color vision deficiency (CVD). Participants were randomly assigned to either detail-rich or detail-simple VEs to complete neutral item-searching tasks. Results indicate that objective and neutral experience alone cannot elicit empathy towards users, and VR operating designers will utilize task-irrelevant contextual information.

Mixed reality prototyping: a framework to characterise simultaneous physical/virtual prototyping

“…Any framing must then recognise the role of the product, the user, and the interaction between the two. Equally, the environment in which the prototyping activity occurs influences the activity itself and its outcomes (Kaplan et al, 2021), as repeatedly underlined by research considering the role of the environment on ideation (Nanjappan et al, 2023) and design activity (Hu et al, 2023;Trump and Shealy, 2023). Similar framings of design as the interaction between person, product, and environment are present across literature (i.e.…”

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