Apple finally launched its Vision Pro “spatial computing” device in early February. We immediately saw TikTok memes of influencers being ridiculous. I wrote about my hope for the Apple Vision Pro back in June 2023, when it was first announced. When preorders opened for Vision Pro in January, I told myself I wouldn’t buy it. I couldn’t justify the $3,500 price tag. Out of morbid curiosity, I would lurk in the AVP subreddits to live vicariously through those who did take the plunge.
After about a month of reading all the positives from users about the device, I impulsively bought an Apple Vision Pro. I placed my order online at noon and picked it up just two hours later at an Apple Store near me.
Many great articles and YouTube videos have already been produced, so this post won’t be a top-to-bottom review of the Apple Vision Pro. Instead, I’ll try to frame it from my standpoint as someone who has designed user experiences for VR.
After years of rumors and speculation, Apple finally unveiled their virtual reality headset yesterday in a classic “One more thing…” segment in their keynote. Dubbed Apple Vision Pro, this mixed reality device is perfectly Apple: it’s human-first. It’s centered around extending human productivity, communication, and connection. It’s telling that one of the core problems they solved was the VR isolation problem. That’s the issue where users of VR are isolated from the real world; they don’t know what’s going on, and the world around them sees that. Insert meme of oblivious VR user here. Instead, with the Vision Pro, when someone else is nearby, they show through the interface. Additionally, an outward-facing display shows the user’s eyes. These two innovative features help maintain the basic human behavior of acknowledging each other’s presence in the same room.
I know a thing or two about VR and building practical apps for VR. A few years ago, in the mid-2010s, I cofounded a VR startup called Transported. My cofounders and I created a platform for touring real estate in VR. We wanted to help homebuyers and apartment hunters more efficiently shop for real estate. Instead of zigzagging across town running to multiple open houses on a Sunday afternoon, you could tour 20 homes in an hour on your living room couch. Of course, “virtual tours” existed already. There were cheap panoramas on real estate websites and “dollhouse” tours created using Matterport technology. Our tours were immersive; you felt like you were there. It was the future! There were several problems to solve, including 360° photography, stitching rooms together, building a player, and then most importantly, distribution. Back in 2015–2016, our theory was that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Sony, and Apple would quickly make VR commonplace because they were pouring billions of R&D and marketing dollars into the space. But it turned out we were a little ahead of our time.
This is the third article in a three-part series offering tips on how to get a job as a product or UX designer. Part 1 covers your resume and LinkedIn profile. Part 2 advises on your portfolio website.
If you have stood out enough from the hundreds of resumes and portfolios a hiring manager has looked at, you’ll start the interview process.
From my point of view, as a design hiring manager, it’s all about mitigating risk. How do I know if you will do great work with us? How do I know that you’ll fit in with the team and positively change our dynamic? How do I know that your contributions will help get us to where we need to be?
Ultimately the interview process is very much like dating: we’re figuring out if we’re right for each other, slowly engendering trust, and showing interest—without overdoing it.
The interview process will vary for each company, but in general, it’ll be:
This is the second article in a three-part series offering tips on how to get a job as a product or UX designer. Part 1 covers your resume and LinkedIn profile. Part 3 is about the interviewing process.
As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, portfolios used to be physical cases filled with your work, and you only had one of them. But now that portfolios are online, it’s much easier to get your work out there.
Much like resumes, many designers make the mistake of over-designing their portfolio website, trying to use it as a canvas to show their visual design or interaction chops. Don’t do it.
This is the first article in a three-part series offering tips on how to get a job as a product or UX designer. Part 2 advises on your portfolio website. Part 3 covers the interviewing process.
(With apologies to Maxine Paetro, whose seminal 1979 book How to Put Your Book Together and Get a Job in Advertising was highly influential in my early job search process in the mid-1990s.)
I graduated from design school in the spring of 1995. Yahoo! was incorporated just a couple of months before. AOL was still the dominant way everyone connected to the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web was still a baby, with just a tiny fraction of websites available. In other words, my design education was about graphic design—layout, typography, logos, print. Neither digital design nor UX design was taught or barely practiced yet. (The closest thing would be human-computer interaction, more computer science than design.)
The San Francisco graphic design scene back in the early- to mid-1990s was pretty close-knit. Most of the established practitioners in The City taught at the California College of Arts & Crafts (CCAC, but now shortened to California College of the Arts (CCA)), fertile ground for finding interns and junior designers. Regardless, all of us graduating seniors needed to have portfolios. Physical portfolios. Some books—another name for portfolio—were basic: a leather folio with plastic slip pages filled with mocked-up posters, booklets, or photos of projects. Or some designers would custom bind books with special hardware and print their work on fine paper, spending hundreds of dollars. But you had one book. So when applying for jobs, you had to leave your book with the design studio for a few days to a week! Which meant that job hunting was very slow going.
We communicate in stories. Storytelling has been around as long as our species has existed. From paintings on cave walls in Lascaux, to hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt, to radio dramas like “War of the Worlds” that cause city-wide panic, to the fantastical Game of Thrones television series on HBO, stories impart culture, history, information, and ideas. Stories are primal so we are receptive to them, and we remember them.
Today when we think of storytelling, we think of our modern day’s Golden Age of Television or the Marvel Cinematic Universe (“MCU”) movies. Comic-Con in San Diego is the Mecca of pop culture storytelling, and this year brought an estimated 135,000 fans from over 80 countries. Attendees packed over 2,000 panels and screenings and lined up for more than 250 autograph events from their favorite actors, writers, and artists. Fans lined up for hours, often overnight, for a chance to get into the infamous 6,500-seat Hall H where they were able to get a glimpse of their favorite star talking about their latest film or TV project. Many came to the con dressed as their favorite characters, often constructing their own elaborate costumes. That is fandom, otherwise known as brand loyalty.
What lessons for design and branding can we learn from Comic-Con and its pilgrimage of rabid fans? Storytelling has power, and design is storytelling.
Yesterday Apple announced its third-generation iPad, simply named “iPad.” Buried in MG Siegler’s excellent take on the press event is this statement:
What's more likely — 5 years from now, your primary home computing device is a PC? Or 5 years from now, your primary home computing device is a tablet? Just two years ago, this question would have been an absolute joke. Now it's a joke to think it will take a full five years.
In the post-PC world, tablets are becoming the new normal more and more. In just the two years since the iPad was first introduced, we’ve seen it pervasive on airplanes to entertain children, many executives in Silicon Valley walking around with them instead of lugging laptops, and even the President of the United States receiving his Presidential Daily Briefing via iPad instead of a sheet of paper.
This post was originally published on Bow & Arrow from PJA (my employer) on February 3, 2011.
The New York Times recently published an article about how apps and web services are enabling consumers to customize how they read their online content. From apps like Flipboard and Pulse to services like Readability and Instapaper, users are increasingly demanding to consume content whenever, wherever and however they want.
When Apple introduced the iPad a year ago, many print publishers saw it as a panacea for their dwindling readership. By creating digital editions, they hoped to recapture some of the eyeballs lost to aggregators and RSS feeds. One of the pioneering publication apps was the WIRED Magazine iPad app. Because of its novelty, its debut issue sold 73,000 digital copies in nine days, almost as much as on newsstands. There is a clear desire from users to read magazines on their tablets.
Customer and user experience is not always about the website, the phone call, or person-to-person interaction in a store. It can also come through the form of packaging.
I just bought a Mac mini recently (for a living room media server) and was blown away by the unboxing. Apple has always been really great about their packaging. Having worked at Apple, I’ve seen the extreme extent of explorations that go into creating the outside of the box (over 500 comps were created for the Power Mac G5 box). (Incidentally, I worked on the second generation iPod package that featured musical artists like Jimi Hendrix.)
What really impressed me about unboxing the Mac mini was not the outside (although nicely designed), but the inside. The package anticipated my every move. How? Let me illustrate.
The design blog that connects the dots others miss. Written by Roger Wong.
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