Sisu VR is a startup company aiming to leverage Virtual Reality experiences to combat harmful work environment through immersive training programs. It is is a people-first company with a mission to educate our customers on how to effectively address incidents of workplace misconduct and emergencies. Sisu has been nominated for both "Best Enterprise Solution" and "Best Societal Impact" for the 2023 Augmented World Expo Awards.
Co-Lead Product Designer
As the co-lead product designer at Sisu, I was responsible of conducting UX analysis and improvement suggestions on Sisu's VR training modules using Meta Quest 2.
Website Developer
• At Sisu, the CEO offered me the great opportunity and also responsibility to become the co-lead product designer. I was in charge of creating and revising current designs of the employee and supervisor customer portal.
• Along with the other co-lead designer, I also attended weekly website meetings with software engineers and website coders to discuss and ensure quality of website hand-off process and also generate feedback on website implementation.
Scrum Master
I was fortunate enough to be the scrum master utilizing an Agile method to lead daily and weekly product scrum meeting and project standups. As the scrum master, I was responsible of managing our team's individual work progress through the Agile method on Trello Board, achieving monthly milestones by breaking them into short term goals.
• As a product designer for Sisu's main product, I was responsible of testing training modules to make sure they are ready to be published. I categorized my feedbacks into D1, D2, D3 & D4. D1 being minor glitches and D4 being errors that entirely prevents users from proceeding with the module.
• When going through the modules as a UX designer, I focus on the interactivity, immersiveness and believability of the module. After writing down feedback notes based on these three criterions, I report back to the chief software engineer on the team & provide additional suggestions.
• Since the main software Sisu uses to build VR spaces is through Unity, I decided to learn more about the fascinating software in my own time.
• Additionally, I started attending VR spaces meetings in which designers showcase the spaces they created and obstacles they had to overcome. Learning from my colleagues and making use of my own time, I was able to code my own game in Unity at the end of my internship.
The first thing I had to work on was redesigning the Sisu customer portal. The first thing I did was to make sure I understood the main purposes of the customer portal. The portal has four main pages that each perform key functions:
• Home: Supervisors can view their employees' general progresses on their assigned modules as a whole on this page.
• Registration: Supervisors can register new employees into the training program and also edit registration status using this page.
• Module Downloads: Supervisors & employees can download their training modules following instructions on this page.
• Employee Progress: Supervisors are able to keep track of individual progresses & send out notifications to the employees individually when needed.
During my user testing, I asked my users to navigate through all of the pages after giving them a general idea of what the portal is for. It did not take long before I realized that there was a lot of confusions and spaces for improvements on the Home page, Registration Page and Employee Progress page. These are the user testing insights we got:
After making some simpler fixes after going through user testing feedbacks, I spent most of my time designing for the Home page and the Send Notification page under Employee Progress page while the other designer focused on the Registration Pages.
I ended up spending multiple hours trying out design functions directly on the high-fidelity prototyping. I was overwhelmed and was frequently lost in the complex Figma prototype. At that time, I only wanted to finish the tiresome design modifications as soon as possible; however, looking back right now, I would have done many things differently...
• I would try out design ideas and layouts using sketches first. I have learned that sketching is a lot more low-stake compared to jumping straight into Figma. I am more able to explore different layouts creatively.
• After first round of user testing on the sketches, I would turn my sketches into wireframes or low-fidelity prototype on Figma and conduct another round of user testing to make sure the new implementation is both usable and intuitive.
I had the great opportunity to learn the Agile methodology by being the scrum master who hosted various meetings including daily product standups and weekly product scrum meetings.
• As I picked up the role as the scrum master, I realized how powerful the approach is. Using a task tracker like Trello and an Excel sheet, we were able to break down goals into chewable and achievable tasks that prompted the team forward. We celebrated every time when we reached a KPI and the sense of accomplishment really pushed us forward to reach goals after goals.
• Slowly, I realized that I was able to view a long-term goal as a puzzle and view every task leading to the goals as pieces of the puzzles. As I quickly accomplished tasks after tasks with agility, I finally realized why it is called a Agile methodology.
First of all, I want to express the greatest gratitude to Sisu's CEO for seeing my potential as a product designer from the beginning. She gave me an opportunity to work with all of these passionate and self-driven people when I had little experience in the field. In this valuable experience, I learned many lessons:
Sisu allows me to set my own goal at the start of the internship. I was held accountable for my responsibility from the day that I start. I was the sole person that is entitled to keep track of my progress. If I was behind on my work, the whole team was effected. As a result, I had learned to understand my obligations and capacity when setting and achieving goals.
Since I was working part time for this internship during my school year at that time, I had a lot on my plate. I experienced several burnouts during my internship and had witnessed a decreased passion in my work. Fortunately, I had the pleasure in working with remarkable individuals at Sisu who were all self-motivating workers who constantly found meaning in their work. From them, I learned to take a break from work once in a while and rethink about why I initially wanted to do UX design. Giving myself that break was crucial in reminding me how much I actually love the work I do.
