🏡 Welcome to Renoo an affordable Home Renovation VR Application! Committed to helping homeowners save money and unleash their creativity 🚀
🌟 Project Overview
Lead UX designer, Researcher, Product Designer, VR Unity Developer.
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Researched, ideated, analysed data, designed, prototyped and tested with users.
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Produced all Spatial UX/UI Designs, 3D assets and VR Prototype.
👩🏻💻 My Role
3 Months, Aug - Nov, 2022
⌛ Duration
The project brought together Master’s students from design, technology, business and sciences.
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🎨 Designer (Inclduing me)
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Calvin Embleton
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💼 Business Managers
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Jessica Zhang
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Yue Zeng
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🔬 Scientists
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Nathan Corr
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Gray Horwitz
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🤝 Multidisiplinary Team:
Unity, Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest Developer Hub, Blender, Miro, Monday, Slack, Zoom, Google Drive/Docs/Slides
🧰 Tools Used
Our Process
🌐 How did it start? Why blend Home Renovation with VR?
It all began with a mutual goal:
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To understand how we could create a new, innovative offering in the virtual reality (VR) space.
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Tackle the untapped potential of Virtual Reality (VR) to solve a real-world challenge!
I was also very interested in spatial design and keen to learn VR development to expand my skill set.
We had a professor and friends who were undergoing home renovation and they talked and ranted about how hard is it. So we thought 'Oh maybe it's a topic and field we can tackle' and help solve.
🚧 Home Renovation Costs a lot of Money & Time
🤯 It's a Design Nightmares
THE CHALLENGE
Homeowners grappling with design miscommunications, architects drowning in slow iterations. Homeowners, architects, and designers found themselves tangled in a web of chaos whilst getting local council renovation approvals.
$35,000
average cost of a home renovation in Sydney.
X 20%
of the budget is wasted due to overspending
= $7000
on average on each home renovation. Sad Wallet :(
We uncovered that 20% of fees was due to what we call "The Architectural Black Hole" between the start and end of the whole renovation process.
Unreliable Response and Wait Time
For design iterations due to rendering and visuals - Charge money regardless.
High Cost of Change
Altering designs = More time and Money. The average of architect's cost around AUD $50-250 per hour. 😟
Complex Software
Professional programs like CAD, Rhino 3D... the average can’t use so homeowners relies to designers to make the design changes.
🌟 Renoo: VR for Home Renovation 🏡
SOLUTION
With Renoo, we wanted to find a way to put the power of 3D architectural renderings into the hands of the homeowner. By providing a simple, affordable, and intuitive application, customers could use pass-through technology to measure and outline their space before switching to full VR to finalise their design.
$5,250
Average cost for a homeowner to hire an architecture firm.
X 1/2
Renoo splits the time spent with architects in half.
= $2,625
is how much a user would save on average by utilising Renoo earlier in their renovation process.
Endless Iterations
included in the monthly subscription cost of service.
Intuitive Application
This means that even if you don't have 3D expertise anyone can jump in and start creating design journey.
Affordable Platform
to overpriced companies with vague lead times and overpaid experts.
🎯 We want to cut down on the costly iterations customers need to go through with expensive architects by providing them with the tools to reach their perfect design faster on their own.
⚙️ How Does Renoo Work?
Users enter an AR-like feature in the VR headset to see in a real-world view.
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Users can take measurements to import them into a 3D space seamlessly.
Take real-life measurements using passthrough VR 📏
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Users can play around with dimensions, move, resize, and experiment with textures.
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Designers and users can import documents, photos, blueprints, materials and even SketchUp, and CAD 3D models into Renoo.
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Able to see every inch of the design, better than 2D renderings.
🎨 3D Immersive Design Tool — Help Explain Needs & Designs 👍
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Solves the miscommunication between homeowners and designers.
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Users can invite people to their 3D canvas to ideate together, share ideas, and collaborate
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A 3D playground where ideas shine.
🤝 Real-time Collaboration
01 RESEARCH | MARKET ANALYSIS
🏡 Research Home Renovation & VR Market Trends & Opportunities in Australia
🌐 In 2021, according to studies by BlueWeave Consulting, the global home improvement market valued at $333.7 billion and is expected to increase.
🔍 Porter's 5 Forces Analysis:
🚪 Ready to enter the field:
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Low threat to entering the market as VR is expensive and fairly new.
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Competition has not yet surpassed threatening levels.
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Low buyers' bargaining power: There are few options in the market.
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Threat: Substitutes exist, although not too severe.
🤼♂️ Analysed 5 Key Competitors
💡 Competition in Visualization:
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Only provide a very high-fidelity model and showcase the final design. Which can be overwhelming for users to iterate.
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Mainly Virtual Tours and real estate.
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Help users understand the design concept detailed with material, and colours and sell market furnishings.
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Expensive service fee.
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Biggest competitor: Houzz
Overall the market encourages growth & innovation opportunities.
📊 Key Market Trend:
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Increase in younger homeowners leading the home improvement market.
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Advanced technologies like AI, IoT, VR, and AR are rising in demand for home improvement services.
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Increase in online shopping for material adds opportunities for market growth.
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The aftermath of COVID-19 and work-from-home culture increase the demand of home improvement.
🚀 2022 Home Renovation:
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49% of homeowners renovated and 39% decorated their homes.
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Renovation spending increased by 133% from $15,000 to $35,000.
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In 2021 94% of Homeowners seeked help from builders and architects and design-related services for their renovations.
🪝Diving to User Needs & Painpoints
01 RESEARCH | EMPATHISE + USER RESEARCH
Secondary Research + Interviews
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Understand the important key players throughout a typical home renovation.
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Uncover the complexities of the home renovation space within New South Wales..
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Comprehensive understanding and Identifying pain points needs and wants across stakeholders.
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Seeking opportunities to merge VR technology. 🏡🔍
🕵️♂️ Research Aims:
💬 Identified Key Players
Secondary research showed that homeowners, architects, local government councils, and various contractors all play a key part in the complex stakeholder communications and interdependencies of the life cycle of a home renovation.
🎙️ 6 Interviewes: 4 Architects, 2 Home Owners & 1 Council Member 👥
📋 To gain first-hand insights we meticulously structured 3 semi-structured interview scripts, tailored to each stakeholder to gain valuable perspectives.
❓ Questions: Uncover the entire lifecycle of home renovation projects—tailored questions based on their role to identify pain points, needs, and interests in merging VR.
🎯 Aim: To maximise our understanding. Understand if there was any overlap between them all to build a solution.
Conducted both in-person and Zoom interviews.
🤝 Target Interviewees:
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Homeowners who have done, or are currently undergoing home renovation.
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Architects who specialise in home renovation projects.
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Local council members who approve home renovations.
🧠 Identified Key Challenges & Opportunities.
02 DEFINE | SYNTHESIS RESEARCH INSIGHTS
🎨✨ To synthesise the data we listed quotes into larger and more specific categories. We went through 4 versions and were able to pull out 9 key how might we statements (HMW) that would help us ideate our solution. 🚀
🌐 Affinity Diagramming
✔ Council Insights:
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Infrequent and unclear communication frustrated all stakeholders.
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Extra Workload: Small changes snowballed into extensive tasks for architects, extending work time = More Money and Time.
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Lack of Control: Homeowners want to control, and are forced to discuss minor design changes through architects due to complex software and visualisation. They desire for active involvement and control emerged as a common theme.
😵💫 Design Dilemmas:
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Trouble Visualizing: Homeowners struggled to understand technical drawings, which led to stress when needed to make permanent decisions and increased the risk of dissatisfaction.
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VR Can Resolve 2D Rendering & blind spots: VR can aid the design stages. By offers clarity to better communicate designs and clients can feel safe to see every inch of the design to reduces mistakes and confusion.
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❌ Homeowner Pain Points:
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Design Desires vs. Skill: Homeowners' indecisiveness and constant design changes, slow down the process and increases costs.
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A lack of skill and control is the main issues.
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Stressful Limited Time: The decisions are permanent and expensive. Decisions cause stress and anxiety for home owners.
💡 Insightful Quotes
"Home renovation projects are a disaster...the clients confirm a design and then change it the next day" #1 Architect.
"We can't easily make design changes on our end without involving the architect, because the professional design tools are complex" #2 Homeowner
“Selecting all the colours and finishes...you don't have much time and it can be quite stressful." #4 Homeowner
🔛 Thoughts on VR for Renovation:
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Architectural Enhancement: VR can assist in design progress, visualization, and client communication. It provided a competitive edge for architects and improved the overall pitching process.
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VR Opportunity: Help identify issues in design, and a cost-effective 3D renders to avoid issues e.g. blind spots in 2D and ease the council approval processes.
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Disadvantage: "Without VR it doesn't change the current process but it adds value. Hard to adapt to VR. Not everyone has a headset." #3 Architect.
✔ Council Insights:
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Time Costly: Getting council approvals takes 5-6 months on average. Strict regulations, including Australian Standards and the National Construction Code, complicated the process.
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Communication Challenges: Councils focused on compliance, often failing design plans. Multiple document submissions and back-and-forths further extended the time and expense of getting approved.
02 DEFINE | HOW MIGHT WE'S (HMW's) + PROBLEM STATEMENT
🤔 How Might We's
Out of our initial 9, we chose 3 that we believed were ideal guideposts for our ideation:
📋 Problem Statement
How might we utilise the benefits of VR technology to simplify the home renovation process bridge the communication gap and provide a tool for homeowners to iterate efficiently with architects?
03 IDEATION + DEVELOP | GENERATE IDEAS + SOLUTIONS
🔄 Transforming Insights & HMWs into Innovative Concepts & Solution.
💡 With in-depth understanding and insights, we had brainstorming sessions — ideation war.
🚩 Challenge: Because our team is interdisciplinary there were a lot of disagreements due to the way we think, we discussed, bounced-off ideas and listened to each other.
✍ 36 ideas from Brainwriting. 🔍 Prioritization tool: Dot Voting → Final Solution: Focus on Collaboration + Deisgn Iteration.
🗳️ Decision & Debates: Voting became our best friend steering us toward the concept with the optimal impact in our constrained timeframe. Interestingly we had similar ideas.
🤝 Final Concept Solution = Merged Top 3 Concepts: Collaborative Board, Live Collaboration and Suggestions and Homeowner VR Editing Program.
🎨 Design Principles — Ensure User-centric Experience
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User-Centered: Prioritize the needs and preferences of homeowners and architects.
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Seamless Collaboration: Facilitate real-time collaboration between homeowners and architects in a visually rich environment.
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Intuitiveness: Most people will be using VR for the first time so we need to ensure an intuitive interface, minimizing the learning curve for users.
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Iterative Efficiency: Streamline the design iteration process to save time and costs for users.
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Immersive Visualization: Provide a realistic and immersive environment for users to visualize their design ideas effectively.
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Not just a gimmick: VR had to be a tool that adds value and solves a real human problem.
02 DEFINE | PERSONA
👤 Created a Detailed Persona to Empathize with User Needs & Solve Challenges from Research.
We decided our final target audience to be homeowners because they had the most pain points and needs VR could meet. 🚀 Research Insight-Driven Personas: Meet Zack, a tech-savvy young homeowner looking to renovate. It allowed us to ensure our designs, decisions and solutions were centre and targeted to their unique needs.✨
🚀 Defining Renoo's Value Proposition, Revenue Streams & Business Model.
03 IDEATION + DEVELOP | BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS
🎨 Crafting Success & Precision in Design: Each block is crafted to solve HMWs, and user needs, and relieve challenges. 💰 Financial Stability: Use strategies to ensure the business generates enough revenue to keep Renoo running.
🌐 Renoo's Business Strategy 🏡
03 DEVELOP + IDEATION | BUSINESS STRATEGY
📍 Position Map
We positioned ourselves in between "affordable" and "Low fidelity".
Slogan: Rather pay architects for $50 to $250 hourly for slow iterations with no control or Renoo for $49 a month for unlimited control and iterations.
💠 Renoo's Subscription + Differentiation Plan
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Positioned: A unique, user-friendly VR platform, differentiating from traditional design processes.
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Collaboration: Partnerships with architectural firms and design professionals to expand Renoo's user base.
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Accessibility: A subscription model, making VR home design affordable for a broader audience.
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Implement rental services for VR headsets to cater to users without personal devices.
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Continuous Improvement: Commit to continuous improvement through user feedback, technological advancements, and evolving design trends.
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Have Targeted Marketing Strategies to Outreach: Both homeowners and design professionals.
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Scalability: Plan for scalability by incorporating flexibility in design for future feature enhancements and industry partnerships.
🥵 🤦🏻♀️ Challenges Faced:
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We only had 2 weeks left to pitch our venture and build a functional prototype.
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Team members who said had experience in coding, and Unity VR development actually didn't 😵.
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The coding/Unity team members' computers and code/what they made didn't run or work 🫠.
💪🏼 💻 How I solved the issue:
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Because I was extremely passionate and interested in spatial design VR development in my spare time I was learning Unity, coding and building Renoo's prototype.
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My prototype and code worked with the headset 🥳.
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After discussions with my team. I took on the VR Unity Developer role and built, and designed the whole VR app prototype myself.
Reflection: At this point, I was panicking, stressed to fail my team as we were very tight on schedule and time. With a limited time and skills in VR development and coding in C# and Unity. With Renoo's concept design including alot of features and functionality, I know I'm not skilled enough to build all of it. I had no time to overthink and think I could magically build all of it. I thought realistically about What Needs To Be Done Right Now? What Can and Can't I build in a span of 2 weeks? 💡
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I decided to use the MoSCoW prioritization method to help set goals, break down tasks and act as a source of accountability for myself and my team.
📋 Used Prioritization Strategy - MoSCoW before Prototyping
🎯 Aim: Build a functional VR prototype with enough features to present our product idea, potential & value.
🚀 Crafting Renoo: VR Design & Development
04 VR DESIGN + DEVELOPMENT + DELIVER
Finally, through many YouTube tutorials, endless fails, trial and error, problem-solving and rethinking and all-nighters. I successfully built a fully functional VR prototype. 🎉
Pat myself on the back — I did beyond expected I built the additional should-have features from the MoSCoW chart.
The final prototype includes:
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Use passthrough to take measurements.
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Grab and move Interactive objects with haptic feedback.
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Change textures of objects.
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Whiteboard: For users to add notes or draw.
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Reduced motion sickness through teleportation, snap turn and have continuous movement.
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Avoided errors & confusion: By providing instructions and photos of controller settings to follow.
🏁 Final Design & Build
🧐 User Testing + Pitching + Results
05 USER TESTING + PITCH + RESULTS
Due to time limitations, I wasn't able to user test with real users but to ensure intuitiveness and ease of use 🧐. I quickly conducted a heuristic evaluation with my peer designers.
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Aim: Identify design problems, to ensure that the VR app aligns with their expectations and preferences.
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Tested: The VR experience, controls, buttons, instructions, motion sickness, accessibility, font size, distance, and interactions with objects.
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Fixed based on their feedback: Bugs found during the test and enlarged the text size for a more efficient and enjoyable user experience.
📝 Heuristic Evaluation: Tested with 3 Designers to Ensure Accessiblity
Successful Pitch, Presentation and Live Demo:
We did a live demo and pitched Renoo to professors and panellists from the Incubate award-winning startup program at USYD.
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Renoo's solution had positive responses during pitches and presentations.
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Interest within the target audience indicated a strong potential for user adoption.
Concept Validation:
Through initial user feedback and engagement, Renoo validated its concept. Renoo addressed a genuine need in the market. Positive feedback became a key achievement in confirming the viability of the VR UX/UI Spatial Design venture.
🚀 Results + Key Achievements
✨ Next Steps
💻 Ongoing Improvements
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Hiring professional VR developers to refine Renoo prototype and build the rest of the features I wasn't able to do.
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Pitch to investors to invest in Renoo.
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More user testing, iterations and repeat.
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Release to the market.
🌍 Market Size Analysis & Potential:
With lessons learned, we stay open to exploration, venturing into diverse avenues within the VR spatial design domain. We calculated the Total Addressable Market (TAM), Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM)and Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM). This helped Renoo define the customer and revenue opportunities within the VR Home Renovation market.
🎯 Renoo targets VR owners, homeowners, and creatives like architects, interior designers.
Spatial Awareness & XR Interactions Controls
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Design for a three-dimensional (3D) space.
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Basic physicality interaction: Object hover, select, grab and manipulation.
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Considerations include using rays or not, hand tracking or controller.
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Mimic real-world actions in VR controls.
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Use visual cues and affordances for user guidance.
Visual & Haptic Feedback
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Ensure interactive elements have sufficient size.
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Implement haptic feedback for interactive indication.
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Use ray casts for controls, providing thicker rays for easier targeting.
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Use haptic feedback on controller hover to indicate interactiveness.
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UI elements were strategically placed at a comfortable distance for the user.
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Increase UI button sizes for easy targeting.
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Option for ray casts for better interaction precision.
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Ensuring readability without causing eye strain.
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Closer UI elements had larger text to enhance legibility.
UI Design: Buttons, Target Area, Distance & Text Size:
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Traditional 2D interfaces use simple navigation, but in a VR environment there are motion challenges.
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Various locomotion options were explored: teleportation, smooth movement, and snap turns.
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Users will use Renoo to design and iterate for extended time so it's crucial to reduce motion sickness.
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I chose to use teleportation, snap turn, and continuous movement options for user flexibility.
Locomotion & Motion Sickness:
🚀 My VR UX/UI Design & Considerations to Enhance User Interaction & Experience
While developing the key functions on Unity and working and 3D models in Blender. As a UX/UI Designer, I can't help but to think about the users. Despite the learning curve of transitioning from 2D to VR design. I explored and made several unique design considerations like interaction, and UI to improve the overall user experience.
✨ Ensure accessibility, learnability & affordance to reduce cognitive load & motion sickness for users.
👩🏻💻 Lessons Learnt & Reflection
Challenges Faced & Took Initiative to Sovle the Problem
Not going to lie but creating Renoo was intense with tight deadlines, VR expertise gaps, unmet expectations, technical issues, communication barriers, conflicting priorities, disagreements, unclear roles, and cultural clashes.
I quickly adapted and took on different roles to support my team members in order to finish our work and get results. With interest and expertise, I stepped into the VR Unity Developer role and lead the design and developed our whole final prototype.
Working in Multidisciplinary Team — Embrace Differences & Skills
Renoo was my first time working in a multidisciplinary team, it was a valuable experience I learnt the importance of communication, patience, and adapting to diverse opinions. Key learnings: Balanced team dynamics, managed conflicts, and fostered effective collaborative problem-solving skills. Because not everyone has a design background I guided members in adopting the design thinking approach for real-life challenges.
We sheduled meetings together, used task managers with agendas and objectives for accountability, and embraced interdisciplinary differences.
With my passion, interest and personal expertise, I stepped into the VR Unity Developer role during challenges, showcasing leadership and adaptability.
Leadership & Adaptability:
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Developed a functional VR program which is crazy and awesome but within 2 weeks without prior knowledge!!! I'm shocked I was able to learn and build it successfully. It's amazing what time pressure and prioritization can do.
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Learnt Unity and C# for VR development (Aim to improve and learn AR development).
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Understood and learnt the art of UX/UI spatial design for VR.
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Deepened understanding of 3D space and user experience.
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Improved my 3D modelling skills in Blender and rendering.
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Improved in pitching and live demoed to a panel of investors, professors and peers.
Personal Growth — VR/UX/UI Design
✨ I'm proud of team achievements and I learnt to lead, overcome challenges, and thrive as an individual and team player. 🌱
Iterative Growth
Our next steps involve building on Renoo. The experience gained from overcoming challenges will guide us in refining our concept, ensuring it's stronger and more versatile.
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Attract investors to invest in Renoo.
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Hire VR developers: Add features and improve on the prototype then release to the world.
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User test, implement and repeat!!!
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Validated our concept's scalability, proving its potential.
Ecosystem Thinking:
For the best UX experience, as not everyone has a VR headset I imagine Renoo VR product transcends the headset. 🌐📱💻
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Embed on the Web: You can easily share links of the prototype on the web like Figma.
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Work across desktop, mobile AR, and VR headsets right out of the box.
