<aside> 💡 This is an in-depth case study for the design of the Sidequest Desktop App. If you are interested in an overview of this project, check out my portfolio page: https://kedingdesign.com/Project-Sidequest.
For more details and info, you can contact me at [email protected]
To read this case study in dark mode, press shift+cmd(ctrl)+L
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Table of ContenIntro
In May 2019, Facebook released the first generation of Oculus Quest, the first consumer-facing 6DoF standalone VR headset. This headset received tons amounts of love from not just the new VR adopters but from the pros and developers community as well. Around the same time, Sidequest was born. Co-founded by Shane and Orla Harris, Sidequest aims at prosumers, XR enthusiasts, and developers, providing them with an interface to perform more advanced actions outside Facebook's limitations.
With the popularity of the headset itself, Sidequest started to take over the quest community and keeps updating and evolving better and better until today. However, as a Sidequest user and an interface designer, I always felt something was missing or confusing here and there while I was using this software. In my opinion, it needs some desperate re-work on the design aspects.
<aside> 💡 In early 2021, during a zoom call chitchat, my friend Hua (an awesome landscape designer, as well as another huge XR enthusiast) asked me "what exactly does a UI designer do every day?" In order to better explain my designer routine to my friend, I decided to do a quick and dirty live redesign project just to showcase all the details and processes that might be involved in a typical UI design case. Sidequest became our go-to victim since both of us are the main user and we all felt the pain from time to time.
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The first thing we did was to quickly review all the functions and features of the current sidequest. The following is a screenshot of the Sidequest around March 2021.
As you can see by the time Sidequest was already a full flesh platform to distribute indie content. Most of the screen real estate was used to display the current live free community contents and some sort of editor curated lists. These contents are mainly web-based and will be subjected to change independently from the software itself.
At the same time, the software is also served as a swiss army knife for advanced users to surface lots of device options including but not limited to managing, tweaking, and even debugging the headset. Most of the functions and device status are aligned on this top navigation.
<aside> 💡 Since the Quest OS is based on Android, you can think of Sidequest as an "iTunes" for the headset, with the capability to view sidequest's content library on the web as a browser.
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As a passion project, the best target for user research is on us ourselves. I use Sidequest mainly to tweak settings for my headsets and do some hacking for my customized Beat Saber songs; Hua uses Sidequest to install and experience indie games and apps from the community. After discussing (well, mainly complaining) with my friend, we concluded there are 3 major problems that we wanna address in the redesign.