MO-XR: Method for Observing User Interactions with XR Applications.

Abstract

One of the essential stages of an extended reality (XR) product development is evaluation. It allows researchers assess whether the product meets the requirements of the user and whether it behaves as it was expected by its creators.Many different evaluation methods for XR product development are available to record, describe, quantify, and analyze user experience (UX), with observations being one of them. Observation methods are a flexible tool to perform evaluations, yet they are often poorly applied, lacking description of data collection and data analysis approaches. This paper addresses that issue and proposes a novel approach to performing observation study for extended reality (XR) product development. The proposed method is clearly structured which allows researchers to perform observations in a systematic way to evaluate XR systems. An observation tool is developed and applied to the evaluation for a meditation VR app that we have developed as part of the ASPIRE project. In this paper, the findings of our study in which the tool was applied and explored with survey data are provided. The results show that insights gained the tool enrich understandings of the survey data, which allows for more in-depth evaluation of an XR application.