Alice VR camera control panel

1999 | Design concepts for the camera control panel.

I worked on the development of the control panel for navigation in 3D space of the Alice authoring environment. The design problem presents the difficulty of communicating to novice users how to interact with the control panel in order to move in space. I created 5 design proposals and conducted user-testing studies.

The user studies revealed a number of interesting issues. For example, we discovered that people have difficulties understanding the "drag" action in the UI. When presented with the control panel, users tended to click repeated times as opposed to clicking, holding and dragging the mouse. Another issue was the confusion between the slide and turn functions. Yet another issue was that the direction of the tilt movement was interpreted differently by different people.

In my second proposal the idea was to include an orange circle to communicate the drag function, but after the user testing we found that some users still did not understand that they had to click and drag in order to move, as opposed to just click. The fifth proposal (image shown) was designed with the intention of making the control panel look like a physical slider and therefore indicate the idea of dragging. In addition, the tilt movement was differentiated form the height movement, showing that tilt would produce a rotational movement and height an up/down movement.