Inkspire started with a broader question about how people experience creative work in virtual reality.

VR introduces a different set of design considerations to conventional interfaces. Users are not only looking at a screen and interacting with interface controls; their body, attention, movement and spatial awareness become part of the interaction. This meant that a seemingly simple design decision — such as the angle of a virtual drawing surface — could potentially influence both how someone performs a task and how they experience it.

I wanted to explore this from a psychological as well as a design perspective. Instead of asking simply “which layout looks or feels better?”, I asked:

How does the orientation of a virtual drawing surface affect workload, focus, comfort and overall user experience during creative work in VR?

This gave the project a measurable research question that could be investigated through user testing.

My psychology background influenced the project from the beginning. I researched psychological theories and UX principles that could explain why different spatial arrangements might affect the user's experience.

Cognitive workload

I considered how the way information and interactions are presented could influence the mental effort required to complete a task. Cognitive workload became particularly relevant because VR introduces additional demands around spatial awareness, physical interaction and navigating a 3D environment.

This informed my decision to measure perceived workload, rather than evaluating the interface purely through task completion.

Flow

The project also drew on the concept of flow — a state associated with deep concentration and absorption in an activity. Because creative drawing can naturally involve sustained attention, I was interested in whether the VR environment could support or interfere with this experience.

This influenced both the design of the task and my decision to measure participants' experiences of flow.

Embodied and spatial interaction

Unlike a conventional desktop interface, VR places the user inside the environment. Their physical position, movement and interaction with objects are therefore part of the interface itself.

This led me to treat the drawing surface orientation as an interaction variable, rather than simply a visual design choice.

Together, these ideas helped bridge the gap between psychological theory and practical UX decisions.

Before building and testing the final experience, I explored the problem through existing research and user-focused investigation.

The aim was to understand both the theoretical background and the practical experience of working with creative tools in immersive environments.

I considered what users might need from a VR creative workspace, what could make interaction physically or cognitively demanding, and which aspects of the experience could realistically be measured.

Where qualitative feedback was gathered, this helped provide context around the more measurable findings — allowing me to understand not only what participants experienced, but also how they described that experience.

This research stage helped turn a broad design idea into a testable UX problem.

Rather than designing Inkspire and relying on subjective opinions about whether it worked, I created an experimental setup that allowed the effect of surface orientation to be investigated systematically.

Inkspire was developed as a controlled VR workspace using the Meta Quest 3 and Logitech MX Ink stylus. Participants completed a creative drawing task while interacting with differently oriented virtual surfaces.

Keeping the task and environment consistent allowed the orientation of the surface to become the key variable being investigated.

This was an important shift in my design process: I was no longer only designing an interface — I was designing a research instrument.

Every aspect of the experience needed to support reliable data collection while still feeling natural enough for participants to interact with the system.

I used a combination of quantitative and behavioural measures to evaluate the experience.

Participants completed questionnaires through Qualtrics, including measures such as the NASA-TLX for perceived workload and the Flow State Scale to capture aspects of their psychological experience.

Alongside self-report measures, I collected information from the interaction itself, including task performance and stylus movement data.

This created three different perspectives on the experience:

What users said — their subjective perception of workload, flow and experience.

What users did — their task performance and behaviour.

How users interacted — the movement and telemetry captured from the stylus.

Using multiple forms of evidence was important because no single measure could fully describe the user experience.

I then ran the experiment with participants, following a consistent procedure across the different conditions.

This involved preparing the VR environment, introducing participants to the equipment and task, collecting their responses and ensuring the experimental process remained as consistent as possible between sessions.

This stage gave me practical experience with the realities of user research that are easy to overlook during the design phase. Participant instructions, consistency, data quality and the way questions are presented can all influence the results of a study.

It also reinforced the importance of designing research around the participant experience. A good experiment needs to be understandable and manageable for the person taking part, not just methodologically useful for the researcher.

Once data collection was complete, I analysed the results to investigate how the different surface orientations related to workload, flow, comfort and performance.

The analysis involved working with the questionnaire responses alongside behavioural and stylus telemetry data, allowing me to compare subjective experiences with observable interaction behaviour.

This was particularly valuable from a UX perspective. A participant might report that a particular condition felt more comfortable, for example, while their interaction data could provide another perspective on how they actually behaved within that condition.

Rather than looking for one metric that declared a single design the "best", I used the findings to understand the trade-offs between psychological experience, physical interaction and task performance.

The final stage was interpreting what the findings meant from a design perspective.

The purpose of the research was not simply to determine whether one orientation produced a better result. It was to understand why the interaction may have produced different experiences and what this could mean for the design of future VR creative tools.

This created a feedback loop between psychology and UX:

Theory → Research question → Experiment → User data → Analysis → Design insight

Rather than treating research as something that happens after a product has been designed, I used it to shape how the problem was defined and how the solution was evaluated.