We’re excited to announce an update to Modus VR’s UI in the upcoming February 2021 release! Among many changes, the most notable is the new library navigation. Because this change takes a little getting used to, we wanted to give an overview in advance of the release.
We recommend customers familiarize themselves with the changes prior to hosting a design session with a client.
Our current navigation has served us well but was starting to reach its limits. Some specific issues include:
It was time to rethink how Modus presents the list of available products to users. Our goals included:
The new nav starts off by presenting all products to the user. The user then applies filters to restrict the number of products presented. Typically, within 2-3 clicks the user can be down to a dozen or so results.
Let’s walk through a practical example: finding tower speakers.
The user sees All Products, currently hovering around 250 entries. Clearly this is not a manageable list, so the user goes to the top left menu and selects Electronics.
One click cut the results count in half: 132 products!
The user now selects Speakers, cutting the results in half again. Note that this represents all products in Modus that are tagged as a speaker. The user can stop here with 61 results, continue filtering to reduce the results further, or go back up the chain to either All Products or Electronics.
Looking to have a smaller list to work with, the user selects Towers and is now presented with just 10 options.
From there, the user simply drags a product into the world as always.
It’s fun to go back and look at where we were three years ago to help imagine where we might be in 3 more years.
In October 2017, when we first launched in beta, we had a mere 29 products and our UI’s simplicity matched the demand. A year later, we added divisions to the list to accommodate 57 total objects. In October 2019 we added categories to better organize our 106 objects. We felt like we were bursting at the seams.
Our October 2020 release had roughly 230 objects. If you’ve been keeping track, we’ve doubled the number of products in Modus every year since our initial beta. It’s so exciting to see how much has changed in three short years. I want to thank all of our customers that have been with us for so long and I’m so excited to see what the next three years bring.