Understanding developer adoption of new paradigm for Android XR
Company
Google
Research objectives:
Understand how decision makers approach selection of devices for app development
Understand how developers approached building for smart glasses and XR for the first time.
Understand how existing Android and mobile development mental models translated to XR.
Explore differences between developing for audio-first, visual, and multimodal smart-glasses experiences.
Understand developer perceptions of barriers to adoption
Context:
Android XR offers developers a tooling and frameworks to build immersive and augmented experiences for multiple XR devices in the same space.
Android developers have established expectations of how to build for Android based developing for mobile, phone and other devices. The introduction of AI glasses provides a completely new set of capabilities and questions about how the interactions should be built.
Given the cost of investment both developing and maintaining new applications, my team needed to validate our product strategy, understand developers need more deeply and identify any barriers to adoption.
UXR methods I applied:
Foundational developer interviews —90 minute interview sessions with a review on a concept deck
Cross-functional workshops — I worked with product managers, designers to prioritize research questions and create appropriate slides for the foundational interviews
"I learned that developing for glasses was a completely different paradigm from their previous experiences."
These questions helped to my team to understand developers' current mindsets as well as establish key areas to double down on for getting started documentation.
Developers had many questions and even those with experience developing for audio-first experiences struggled to envision how to develop for AI glasses. Glasses are brand new modal of interaction with opportunities for hands-free engagement with real-world sensing, geospatial interactions and AI agent interactions.
They raised many conceptual questions:
When should an experience rely primarily on audio?
How do background processes work while preserving battery life? When is an app active vs on standby?
How do I communicate app functionality to a user if there is no visual menu?
How much do I have to code with an AI agent? What can AI code for me for conversational interactions, and what do I have to do manually?
"How do I communicate app functionality to the user if there is no visual menu?”
An important part of the research explored how developers thought about building experiences involving AI agents.
Rather than focusing solely on technical capability, I investigated developers' perceptions of the technology, how they imagined incorporating agents into their applications, and what they saw as barriers to doing so.
This surfaced questions around developer understanding, expectations, tooling, and the transition from conventional application development toward experiences where AI could play a more active role.
Impact
Answered foundational questions and provided direction for product managers and designers about how developers conceptualized and approached the emerging platform
Surfaced key challenges and questions related to developing with AI agents and interactions
Identified and prioritized major barriers to developer adoption of Android XR and smart-glasses experiences.
Understood how different companies and decision makers approach selecting XR devices for use cases, to support and adjust our hypotheses and product priorities.
Helped realign product priorities around the issues with the greatest potential impact on developer adoption.
Understood overlaps and differences between Android XR application and mobile application development to provide an intuiive getting started experience for glasses development