Hello there!👋
We are researchers Gabriel Høst Andersen¹, Vittoria Frau¹, Germán Leiva¹, Jacopo Mereu², and Lucio Davide Spano² from ¹Aarhus University and the ²University of Cagliari.

We are conducting a research project that investigates how XR (eXtended Reality)  professionals design their experiences in practice. Our goal is to better understand their needs.

Our broader research goal is to better understand current XR design practices to support the wider adoption of XR technologies, focusing our efforts on helping non-developers and novice practitioners.

• This questionnaire takes ~40 minutes to complete. There are no right or wrong answers: we are simply interested in your personal experience and opinions on XR experience design.
• This questionnaire is divided into four main pages: background, sketching and storyboarding, design guidelines, and AI. You can save your progress at the end of each page by pressing the "Save" button, so you do not need to complete everything in one session. Feel free to take breaks if needed.
• Participation is completely voluntary. You are free to stop at any time and choose not to submit your responses.
• You will be asked to provide your email address. This will be used only for the possibility of contacting you back for a brief follow-up interview. You are under no obligation to participate in any follow-up and may decline at any time. Your email will not be shared outside the research team and will be stored securely.
• Data collected in this study will be jointly processed by the research teams involved (Aarhus and Cagliari) and handled in accordance with applicable data protection regulations. If you decide to submit the form and later wish to have your data removed, you may contact us at [au787301@uni.au.dk]. You can contact this email address for any other questions related to this study.

Thank you for taking the time to participate!😊

IMPORTANT: FROM NOW ON,

ALL QUESTIONS REFER TO XR PROJECTS*

*For XR projects, we mean projects involving Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), or Mixed Reality (MR) technologies.

This section collects general information about your background and experience with XR design.

In this section, we want to understand how XR designers currently use sketches and storyboards in practice.

As a reference and clarity, we will use the following terminology:

• Sketch: a single drawing.
• Sketching: the act of creating sketches.
• Storyboard: a sequence of sketches arranged within a scenario or temporal progression. It adds context compared to a single sketch.
• Storyboarding: the act of creating storyboards.

We also refer to the concept of fidelity. Fidelity describes the level of refinement of a representation and may apply to both physical and digital artifacts. Our terminology:

• Low fidelity: rough, simplified representations.
• High fidelity: representations closer to the final envisioned product. 

In this section, we ask about your experience with XR design guidelines.

Do respond only based on what you do know and use.

As a reference point, here is a non-exhaustive list of major XR guidelines:

• Meta Horizon (🔗).
• Microsoft Mixed Reality (🔗).
• Apple visionOS (🔗).
• Android (🔗).
• iOS (🔗).
• Virtual Reality User Interface Design: Best Practices and Implementation. (🔗) 

Now you have the opportunity to share your thoughts freely. In the next two questions, we ask about the advantages and disadvantages of XR design guidelines based on your personal experience.

We are interested in your honest opinion, whether positive, negative, or mixed. You can refer to guidelines you have used directly, guidelines you are familiar with, or even reasons why you choose not to use them.

Now we ask you to estimate how your time is typically distributed across different design phases. These phases are conceptual categories and do not imply a strictly linear process. In practice, they may overlap or occur iteratively.

For the purpose of this study, we refer to the following phases:

• Understanding the user needs (e.g., requirements analysis).
• Ideating possible solutions (e.g., brainstorming).
• Prototyping or implementing potential solutions (e.g., low or high -fidelity prototyping).
• Testing an implemented solution (e.g., creating test cases, checking edge cases, conducting user studies).

The following questions explore whether and how you use AI-based tools across your XR projects as a whole (not in specific phases).

The following questions explore whether and how you use AI-based tools across the different phases (introduced earlier) of your XR design process.

In this section, we aim to better understand how XR designers interact with conversational AI systems.

We will define conversational AI as any AI system that accepts instructions (INPUT) expressed in natural language (e.g., text or voice) and generates responses (OUTPUT) in various forms (e.g. text, voice, images, design artifacts).

Design case 

You are the XR lead designer at a major company. You are collaborating with Spotify, and they asked you to virtualize their app in AR for an HMD (e.g., Apple Vision Pro or Meta Quest 3). Your team and you have gone through the first design iteration, and have a basic app that allows you to: (1) Select a song; (2) Switch to the next/previous one in the queue; (3) Add a song to a playlist. Spotify’s team have asked you for improvements. They want their app to adhere to the following design constraints: