Context
Animotive lets film and animation professionals perform, direct and edit 3D animation in virtual reality. Its users are experts in their craft, not necessarily in VR. My job was to make a deep, professional toolset feel immediate inside a headset.
VR removes the usual assumptions. There is no precise cursor and no keyboard within reach, and few conventions are settled, so I benchmarked other applications to establish good practice. Legibility, arm fatigue and comfort become primary constraints, and every pattern had to be tested wearing the headset.
Animotive is a small company in a young market. I owned usability and design quality, not sales, and this page shows what I can evidence.
The challenges
1. Reach, comfort and panel placement
Performers need immersion, mobility and comfort. The interface had to respect emerging VR conventions while meeting the demands of a conventional desktop tool, including scheduling and invitations in an embedded web browser.
2. Legibility and information density
Building and debugging the UI inside the game engine, the developers set out their constraints and we agreed a method for design hand-over.
3. Interaction without conventions
Each build and test round improved the interface, and some features disappeared when they were absorbed into others.
How it was validated
Every significant pattern was tested in the headset with working animators, with remote studies and surveys for wider signals. Findings were ranked by severity and fed into the backlog I shared with the team.
Continuous testing with real users and daily conversation with stakeholders kept the main usability problems moving.