Helping designers and developers build user centered multitasking experiences in XR

Students: Camila Proffitt, Ian Page-Echols, Siddhant Patil

We are familiar with using multiple applications and multitasking on our desktops and mobile devices. We imagine a future where this ability of running multiple applications together is also provided by XR devices like HoloLens, MagicLeap and various Virtual Reality Headsets. It is challenging for designers and developers to build these experiences as there are no established design patterns and a lot of concepts are unexplored due to a lack of research on this topic. To solve this problem, our team created the XR Multitasking Design Guide which they can use to ensure that the systems they build, provide a good user experience. We started with hardware and software familiarization, identified user needs, sketched out ideas and evaluated them with subject matter experts. We then generated: 1. A list of system requirements (as seen in the mind map) and, 2. User validated designs that solve a subset of these requirements. Together, they form the XR Multitasking Design Guide.