In immersive technologies, usability is not only a matter of interface design. It depends on how people perceive information, move through digital and physical spaces, interact with devices, and trust the guidance they receive while performing real tasks. This is why, within MOTIVATE XR, user experience has been treated from the beginning as a shared design challenge, developed together with the people who will create, manage and use XR content in industrial contexts.
Deliverable D3.8 – UX Co-Design Report V2, led by CETMA within WP3, marks an important step in this direction. The report consolidates the work carried out to shape, validate and align the user experience of the MOTIVATE XR ecosystem, including the central platform and the set of Authoring and Experiencing tools developed by the consortium. Building on the previous methodological work of D3.7, this second release focuses on the practical implementation of the co-design process, the refinement of user journeys, the evaluation of usability, and the definition of common UX/UI guidelines for the project.
A Participatory Approach to XR Design
The core of this work is based on a participatory approach. Through a structured cycle of workshops, MOTIVATE XR partners, Tool Owners, Pilot Owners and end users worked together to better understand how different profiles interact with the system: from those who create XR training and maintenance content, to operators who use immersive guidance during learning or field activities. This collaborative process made it possible to move beyond assumptions and to ground design decisions in real needs, operational constraints, and concrete feedback from the project’s pilots.
From Insights to Action: Defining the XR User Journey
The co-design activities helped the consortium clarify the distinction between two key moments in the XR content lifecycle: Authoring, where content is created, structured and prepared, and Experiencing, where users access and interact with XR guidance in practical scenarios. This distinction proved essential to define more coherent workflows and to support different levels of expertise, devices and use contexts across the MOTIVATE XR suite. A significant part of the work focused on making the user journeys clearer and more consistent. Participants explored how users access the platform, select tools, upload and reuse assets, launch XR experiences, follow instructions, request support, and interact with digital content. The workshops also highlighted recurring usability needs, such as reducing complexity, improving navigation, ensuring consistency between tools, and making interfaces more predictable and easier to learn. The co-design process also addressed the visual and interaction language of MOTIVATE XR. Partners discussed and compared interface elements such as icons, colour palettes, text panels, 3D objects, warnings and guidance assets. The objective was not simply to choose an appealing visual style, but to identify solutions that remain readable, recognisable, and effective in real industrial environments, where lighting conditions, visual clutter, safety constraints and device limitations can strongly affect the user experience.
Authoring and Experiencing user journey
Co-design Miro Boards shared with our stakeholders
To make these evaluations more realistic, part of the design work was supported by immersive mock-ups based on 360-degree images of pilot environments. This allowed stakeholders to see how interface elements could appear directly within simulated industrial contexts, supporting more informed decisions on visibility, contrast, spatial arrangement and readability. In this way, co-design became not only a discussion activity, but also a practical method for testing ideas closer to real use conditions. The results of D3.8 are therefore highly practical. The deliverable translates workshop evidence into actionable UX/UI guidance and reusable design assets that can support future development, integration and validation activities.
VR and AR preliminary test
These outputs are intended to help partners create more coherent XR manuals, training experiences and maintenance support tools, while reducing ambiguity and fragmentation across the overall ecosystem. More broadly, the work confirms the value of co-design as a way to bring together technical feasibility, user expectations and operational reality. By involving different stakeholders throughout the process, MOTIVATE XR strengthened a shared understanding of what makes an XR interface intuitive, trustworthy and suitable for industrial adoption.
Part of this work has also converged into the scientific paper “Enhancing XR Interface Design through Immersive AR Co-Design and 360-Degree Photospheres”, which will be presented at AHFE 2026 – 17th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics and the Affiliated Conferences, taking place on 20–24 July 2026 at Fenerbahçe University, Istanbul, Türkiye. This represents an important opportunity to share the MOTIVATE XR co-design methodology with the international human factors, ergonomics and XR research community.
References
- “D3.8 – UX Co-Design Report V2” Motivate XR deliverable;
- “Enhancing XR Interface Design through Immersive AR Co-Design and 360-Degree Photospheres” AHFE 2026 – Antonio Zingarofalo, Giorgio Giustizieri, Sarah De Cristofaro and Luca Rizzi
Author
CETMA
Antonio Zingarofalo is a researcher at CETMA’s New Product Development area, within the New Technologies and Design department. He holds degrees in Industrial and Electronic Systems Engineering and Mechanical Engineering – Smart Factory from Politecnico di Bari. His work focuses on innovative product concepts, engineering, IoT integration, sustainability analyses, pilot projects and demonstration activities for SMEs.
