Building a UX foundation for an XR app development platform
2 min read · 543 words
Delivered UX design, user research, and UI design for an XR app development platform at Telekom MMS as part of an EU project.
RoleSenior UX Designer, ongoing from February 2022
Every figure and quote in this case study was supplied by its author. None were generated.
The Challenge
Telekom MMS was contributing to an EU-funded project that required building an extended reality app development platform from the ground up. XR, spanning augmented, virtual, and mixed reality, sits at the intersection of several unsolved interaction design problems: spatial interfaces behave differently from screen-based ones, developer tools carry their own established conventions, and the people building XR applications have needs that do not map neatly onto either category.
The project needed UX design, user research, and UI design delivered in a coordinated way, across a platform type where there were few established patterns to borrow from.
Key Decisions
- 01
Combining research and design rather than sequencing them
- Considered
- Running a discrete discovery phase before any design work began, keeping the two workstreams separate.
- Chose
- I worked research and design in parallel, using early design artefacts as probes in research sessions and feeding findings back into live design work.
- What it cost
- This approach introduces risk: design work done before research is complete may need to be revisited, and artefacts used as probes can anchor participants to early solutions.
XR development tools are a specialist domain. Waiting for research to conclude before designing would have slowed the feedback loop at exactly the point where the interaction model was most uncertain. Running both together meant each informed the other in real time.
- 02
Designing for a developer audience within an XR context
- Considered
- Applying standard UX platform conventions and adapting them for an XR context as problems arose.
- Chose
- I treated the developer workflow as a first-class design constraint from the start, shaping the information architecture and interface language around how XR developers think about building, not how general-purpose dev tools are typically structured.
- What it cost
- This narrowed the platform's apparent generality and required early investment in understanding a specialist mental model before any interface work could be validated.
Developer tools that look like general software and then behave like specialist ones create friction at every step. Getting the model right early was worth the upfront cost.
The Solution
The project delivered a UX design system, research outputs, and a UI design for the XR app development platform. The platform gives developers an environment shaped around XR-specific workflows: the information architecture reflects how XR projects are structured, the interface language borrows from developer conventions where those conventions serve the user, and departs from them where the spatial nature of XR demands something different.
Research ran alongside design throughout, producing documented findings that could inform both ongoing design decisions and future development priorities.
The Results
The XR app development platform was delivered with full UX and UI design coverage across a domain where no ready-made playbook existed.
For Telekom MMS, this meant contributing a design-mature deliverable to an EU project, with research documentation that could support the platform's continued development beyond the initial engagement. The work is ongoing, with scope for the design system and research base to grow as the platform does and as more is learned about how developers actually use it in practice.
The most significant open question is how XR development tools will need to adapt as the hardware itself matures. That is worth tracking, and the foundation built here is designed to be extended rather than replaced.