Build for Everyone: Inclusive Design Tips from Meta Connect 2022

At Meta Connect 2022, we shared how our newest VR headset—Meta Quest Pro—unlocks new opportunities to bring people together in VR. Across all our latest devices—like Meta Quest, Meta Quest 2, and Meta Quest Pro—we’re focused on providing you with the tools you need to build communities where people can join together seamlessly and find something that represents their personal experience. Without taking a deeper look, however, it isn’t always clear where to start—or how to improve.

There are many considerations to keep in mind, including accessibility, cultural diversity, and player preferences—but by knowing what to look out for, you can improve your design, empower players, and address feedback. Below, we dive into tips and considerations that can help you design experiences that are both immersive and accessible for everyone.

When it comes to testing UX, we recommend using a group of diverse testers to account for varied representations in height, weight, hearing, sight, locomotion tolerance, and other differences you’d expect to find within your app’s community.

One way to design with these factors in mind is to leverage interaction generosity, which aims to reconcile the difference between a user’s intent and their inputs. Interaction generosity can also help mitigate hardware or software issues like latency and can be integrated in multiple ways. For example, increasing the time and distance input ranges when users interact with objects can help accommodate audiences with decreased range of motion. Another common example of interaction generosity is seen via buffer periods for time-sensitive interactions that require a user to make an input.

1. Increase tolerance: In other words, increase the range in which users can interact with objects. This is useful in situations where interactions occur far apart from one another or when a user may be interacting with an object that’s not in their field of vision. Where you increase tolerance will depend on the type of experience you’re building. A great example is seen in the game Pistol Whip, where players find themselves physically dodging, artificially moving forward, and shooting at enemies simultaneously. In this case, players are given liberal auto-aim to help offset increasing cognitive juggling, as well as being shown clear indicators for enemy positions to further reduce cognitive load. This creates a flow state that increases accessibility and makes people feel like action heroes even if they aren’t a sharpshooter.

2. Increase stickiness: Stickiness can help ensure that users interact with their intended object and that your app doesn’t lose track of their intended input. This is especially valuable if a user is interacting with one object among many. You can increase stickiness by:

3. Make predictions about user intent: You can rely on game state and information available to the user to make predictions about their intent. For example, if a user is expected to pick up a key on a cluttered desk in order to progress to the next area, you can predict this interaction and give the key additional weight to add stickiness and encourage a smooth experience.

Whether you’re looking to fine-tune your title or starting your build from the ground up, it’s important to remember that interaction generosity doesn’t just make your app more accessible to diverse audiences—it helps reduce frustration for everyone.

Even the most rigorous testing processes won’t be able to cover every physical and sensory representation in VR—and it’s okay if you don’t get everything right on the first try. That said, you can gather (and organize) feedback once your app is live to help address as many gaps as possible. Some effective ways to gather feedback are:

Categorizing and quantifying feedback can shed light on aspects of your app that users are having difficulty engaging with or areas that may benefit from design adjustments. Perhaps best of all, addressing design feedback creates a better foundation to work from when building your next title.

Exclusive designs aren’t always obvious at first glance. If your goal is to reach as many people as possible, it’s important to go through all UX design decisions carefully to identify assumptions. Unknowingly implementing settings that are based on assumptions in user input may end up restricting people from having a positive experience with your app.

To encourage positive experiences, you can give users the freedom to customize their settings and empower them to align their experience with their representation. One way to accomplish this is by building quick select menus, like Resident Evil 4’s Comfort Options menu. Instead of mapping gun holsters to preset positions from the player, the game offers full customizations in distance, spread, and height. This way, players can find the perfect holster position for easy weapon transfer.

Freedom of choice also applies to identity representations like skin tone, hair color, or wheelchairs. When people engage with your app, they may want their experience to reflect how they look, feel, and act in the physical world. To help people feel accurately represented, more customization options are always better.

To help audiences gain visibility on experiences that suit their needs, we’ve added a new shelf in the Meta Quest Store for apps that follow our recommended accessibility VRCs. The Play Your Way shelf features experiences that support various accessibility settings so users can customize their experience. The apps featured on this shelf are curated by our Launch Management team and rotate every few weeks—by adopting our accessibility VRCs, you can increase your likelihood of getting more visibility in the Meta Quest Store.

At the end of the day, inclusive design is good design, and if more people can engage with your app, there’s a better chance you’ll find success. For more information on how you can make your title more accessible and inclusive while reducing frustration, check out the developer sessions in the “Design for Everyone” track from Meta Connect 2022.