XR UX Foundations: Human Factors

If you’re paying any attention at all to social media, you’ll see a whole lot of “cool” XR or Apple Vision Pro mockups and prototypes. And a lot of that “cool” stuff can make people sick, cause neck strain, eyestrain, physical injury, or even psychological trauma.

Any time we interact with a digital device whether 2D or 3D, there can be physical and psychological side effects. We’ve seen this with repetitive use of the mouse or poor posture when sitting at our desk, or with intense video games. Since XR is even more physically and mentally interactive than our 2D devices, we need to keep the side effects in mind so we can work to mitigate them or prevent them.

Human Factors as a field of study focuses on the interaction of humans with machines, and aims to minimize the poor physical and psychological side effects of those interactions. This course focuses on Human Factors as applied to XR and spatial computing.

Whether you’re a designer, developer, or anyone else on an XR project team, your responsibility is to make sure you’re creating compelling and safe experiences.

In this course, I’ll show you how to reduce the risk of these physical and psychological side effects so that you can make sure you’re designing amazing and compelling experiences that don’t cause unexpected or unintended harm to your target audience. This is a curated course of content that I’ve created over the years around human factors, and it will lay part of the foundational knowledge of UX Best Practices for XR that you’ll need when creating your own experiences.