Day 50.

When considering my application and how people bring biases into any decision made, I found that the following three heuristics seemed highly likely for the target audience for our VR application. While these are all common for all users, I felt that addressing these three would make our application as strong as possible.

Anchoring – overly influenced by initial information we learn

Familiarity – favorable opinion of things, people, or places experienced before

Availability – opinion based on ease of recalling relevant information, correct or not

In several of my degree courses we discussed the 8 golden rules of design as suggested by Ben Shneiderman (https://www.cs.umd.edu/users/ben/goldenrules.html). I picked the following design principles based off both his suggestions as well as another more general UX design site (https://www.uxdesigninstitute.com/blog/ux-design-principles/).

Hierarchy – make important information readily available, in obvious and easy to access spots. Important information needs to guide your application. The sooner the information is seen the more influence it will have on the user experiece

Consistency – maintain consistency throughout your applications as well as applications from other developers. many people are familiar with an application or game style and the closer it is to that general layout without copying the application exactly, the better experience users will have. Information and functions will be where they expect, icons and colors will mean what they already understand them to be. Icons & colors especially are huge! People have very firm ideas what colors and icons mean and are easily confused by large variations in either. Often the slightest confusion or frustration about an application can cause it to fail.

Reduce Short Term Memory Load – Also huge. The more people have to remember the more frustrated they will get. Forms with repeating information should be easy to reference previous information, information and data needs to be easy to find and logical. The more people can rely on the application to remember things for them, the more likely they will be to use it. An application should be able to stand alone. If someone is having to write information from an application down on paper to remember then the application needs quite a bit of work.

Overall the goal of application design should be to focus entirely on the User Experience. The application needs to work for them, not necessarily you. But it also needs to convey what you need it to or to fulfil the function you intended it to. Consider every aspect of how the user will use the application and if you have built a successful application the user should be able to pick it up and navigate it like a pro within just a few minutes without getting frustrated.