Storyboards that visually predicts and explores a user's experience with a product.
VR Social Interaction
2020 | Design with Data/UoE | UX Design | Graphic | Rapid Prototyping
overview
This project explores the development of a social platform that enables people to share immersive memories and experiences with family and friends through virtual reality. Storytelling has always been central to human connection. VR now extends this tradition into new territories, not only in entertainment and communication, but also in medicine and therapy. It has the potential to enhance how we connect across distances by creating a sense of presence and emotional closeness. We examined the history of VR and the theoretical foundations behind it, including a concept we refer to as the triangular inspiration. Our approach combined research, prototyping, and reflection on user responses to uncover opportunities for meaningful product design.
target users
International students living abroad often face feelings of loneliness, homesickness, and isolation. The challengeswere intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. In moments like these, a product that fosters meaningful connection becomes not just helpful, but essential. This platform is designed to bridge emotional distances, offering students a way to feel closer to home through shared immersive experiences.
Research & Practice
To guide our practice, we structured the design thinking process into four interconnected spaces: Discover, Define, Ideate and Design. Rather than a linear sequence, these phases function as overlapping modes of exploration - each informing the other to support a more iterative and adaptive approach.
100 ideas brainstorming session
found out the 3 areas that interest us all
• Discover
The first phase of our design thinking process focused on uncovering our shared interests. We transformed this space into a structured brainstorming workshop, where each team member contributed hundreds of ideas. From this exploration, three core themes emerged that reflected our collective curiosity: Human Factors, Interactivity, and Improvement.
• Define
To build a foundational understanding of the user experience, we began by creating broad empathy maps. While these maps were not tied to specific user scenarios, they allowed us to surface key emotional and behavioural insights. From there, we developed three fictional personas grounded in our personal experiences and supporting research. These personas reflect different user types who might engage with our prototype, helping us clarify their needs, behaviours, and goals and ultimately guiding design decisions with empathy and intention.
• Ideate
In this phase, we developed a storyboard and user journey to visually explore how people might interact with our future prototype. We introduced a character named Nana, a sociable, digitally-savvy individual who embraces the latest social media trends and enjoys sharing her life with her followers. Through her story, we illustrated a scenario in which someone turns to the platform to connect and communicate in a more immersive way. The user journey map allowed us to identify pain points in existing social platforms and uncover meaningful opportunities for innovation. These insights helped us shape a product experience that better supports emotional connection and user engagement.
• Design
The final step of the design thinking process is design, where we translated our concept into a working product. We aimed to make content creation on the platform as simple as taking a photo with a phone. After finalising the core functions and app structure, we created wireframes in Adobe XD. Key pages include a video album showing all 360-degree videos in reverse chronological order, a recording page for capturing 360-degree videos with filters, a dialogue page for sharing videos along with text and images, and a video player where users can tap the VR icon to switch to an immersive viewing mode.
