Overview

Sky developed a fully immersive and interactive VR experience that combines both production quality entertainment and opportunities for users to learn about things that interest them.

The application has now been released to Sky customers as ‘Hold the World’ and features a tour of hidden exhibits from London’s Natural History Museum as well as narration and an appearance from Sir David Attenborough.

Being one of the only experiences of its kind, Sky were keen to review the user experience and make final adjustments to the design before development was completed. Threesixty were asked to design a piece of research to generate insights about the experience on Oculus Rift.

“Can you find out if users understand all the interactive elements in our new VR experience?”

What we did

We set up a VR UX research lab and ran 2 days of user research with 10 target users. All the participants were existing Oculus Rift owners or users, familiar with the general control systems of the Rift touch.

We wanted to understand if someone who has experience of VR would be able to navigate through the application and discover all the ways of interacting with objects and content. We set up a viewing room for the Sky product team to observe the sessions and capture key findings.

It was important to maximise the amount of insight in the shortest amount of time to fit in with the development schedule, so we introduced a couple of other activities to ensure a quick turnaround.

We first conducted an expert review of the application prior to the user research so key issues could be identified early on. We then provided a summary of the key discussion points immediately after the sessions were completed to enable Sky to make design decisions within 24 hours of the research.

Outcome

Following the research we produced a prioritised list of key findings with actionable recommendations for how to optimise each interaction where users had struggled.

A number of key design decisions were made to improve the experience, all implemented before the experience was released and without delaying the the development schedule.

Project

Hold The World

Client

BSkyB

What We Did

Usability testing and UX recommendations

Thank you for the last few days.
The project exceeded all expectations.

Alex StreetInsight Controller, Next Gen Product Development