The Integration of Virtual Reality (VR) and User Experience Design (UXD) in the Design of Shared Office Spaces

Abstract

Users’ satisfaction in the design of shared office spaces is one of the important aspects that every enterprise should seek. The research provides and validates a new mechanism that could be used in the design process of shared office spaces, by integrating the tool of Virtual Reality (VR) and User Experience Design (UXD). The proposed mechanism consists of three phases. The first phase (the experiment articulation) illustrates the correlation between the satisfaction factors of users and the physical setting of shared office spaces. In the second phase (the experiment tool preparation), the research articulates the programing scripts which are necessary for the users’ interaction in the experiment using the VR tool, called User Interaction Tool (UIT), where these scripts are: Mouvement Script; Rotation Script; Stretch Script; and Material Script. The third phase (the experiment implementation and tool evaluation) consists of three steps; the first one is an oriented questionnaire for determining users’ needs in shared office space while establishing relative weight for every aspect, and the second step is the experiment implementation for an existing office space to explore the suggested scenarios using the proposed tool, and the third step is crucial for comparing between the existing design model and the deduced one from the proposed mechanism to evaluate the validity of the proposed tool. After testing the tool, the research finds that users’ satisfaction before the experiment is about 43.352 %, while it has been raised to 86.5825 % after using the proposed mechanism. Hence, the users’ satisfaction is almost doubled after using the virtual reality tool in the design process of office space design.