Designing VR As If It Were Everyone’s First Time

By JetStyle, in collaboration with Amaia Etxabe Antia, Design Innovation Center (DBZ), Mondragon University.

At JetStyle, we have been developing XR experiences since 2016: VR rides, corporate training tools, mixed reality applications for collaboration, leisure and lifestyle XR apps, family-friendly games, and non-commercial experimental products created to test new interaction patterns.

Across these projects, one question keeps coming back: how do we design immersive experiences for people who may be entering XR for the first time?

We’ev collaborated with Amaia Etxabe Antia from the Design Innovation Center (DBZ), Mondragon University. Together, we’re looking at VR accessibility not as a late-stage checklist, but as a design mindset that shapes the whole experience from the beginning.

When people talk about VR adoption, the conversation usually centers on hardware, visual fidelity, motion sickness, or content. All of that matters. But a more basic question often gets missed: who is this experience actually designed for?

Too many VR experiences are still built around an “average” user: someone comfortable with two controllers, able to stand for long periods, quick to interpret spatial cues, and already familiar with game-like interaction patterns. Everyone else is expected to adapt.

A better strategy is to design from the edges. In VR, edge cases often reveal more than the average user ever can: the first-time user who has never touched a controller, the person with limited mobility, the user in a noisy demo booth, the person with low tolerance for discomfort, or the user navigating VR in a very small physical space. These are not exceptions to handle later. They are the situations that expose a product’s hidden assumptions.

One practical way to design beyond those assumptions is to build VR as if it were the user’s first time. That mindset is not separate from accessibility; it is one of its clearest applications. As Microsoft’s Inclusive Design framework suggests, disability is not a fixed category belonging only to a small group: human ability shifts across permanent, temporary, and situational conditions, and designing with that spectrum in mind helps solutions scale to a broader audience. A user may have no hearing impairment and still miss instructions in a noisy installation. Another may have no long-term mobility limitation and still struggle because they are tired, recovering from an injury, or using the headset in a cramped space. If an experience works well under those conditions, it is usually better for everyone else.

That matters because in VR, the interface is not just on a screen, it is the whole environment. Users are learning the interaction model, the spatial logic, and the physical demands of the experience all at once. Accessibility, then, is not a layer to add at the end. It is part of the product from the beginning. In practice, that means thinking beyond compliance. It means designing for clarity, confidence, comfort, and control: helping users understand what to do in the first minute, interact without memorizing a tutorial, recover from confusion, feel physically safe, and choose ways of interacting that match their body and context.

In inclusive VR design, accessibility starts with core product decisions: controls, onboarding, comfort, spatial safety, and recovery. 

Accessibility starts before the settings menu

In many teams, accessibility is still treated as a late-stage layer: captions, a seated mode, maybe larger text if the schedule allows it. But in VR, accessibility begins much earlier. It is shaped by the core product decisions that define how the experience works at all: whether two-handed control is required, whether key information is available through more than one channel, whether onboarding teaches through action instead of instruction, and whether users can pause, reorient themselves, and recover easily when they get lost.

These may sound like small design choices, but they are often the difference between an experience that feels intuitive and one that feels exclusionary. A controller-free interaction, a gaze-based interface, a stable spatial anchor, or a clearly defined safe area can change whether users feel capable, confident, and physically secure from the start. W3C’s XR accessibility guidance reflects the same point through concepts such as multimodal support, synchronization of input and output, and customization. For VR teams, that means accessibility is not a checklist item to add later, but a set of early product decisions that shape who can actually enter and use the experience.

One example from our own practice is a VR meditation experience we developed for a mindfulness retreat in the mountains. The experience was designed for location-based use, which meant participants could not be expected to learn controllers, menus, or game-like interaction patterns before the session. Some users could be experienced with XR; others could be trying a headset for the first time. The product had to work for both groups without making the first group wait or the second group feel lost.

That shaped the design from the beginning. We made the meditation experience controller-free, with a zero-learning-curve interaction model: participants could simply put on the headset and begin. Because the retreat offered several types of meditation, we also designed an immersive waiting room that helped users move between meditation options without turning navigation into a separate technical task.

In this case, accessibility was not a settings screen. It was the core interaction model: no controllers, no complex onboarding, and no assumption that the user already knew how VR works.

In Part 2, we look at specific design decisions that make VR more inclusive: reducing interaction burden, embedding onboarding into the experience, treating comfort as UX, supporting perception through several channels, and designing for recovery rather than perfect performance.

If you are planning a VR training tool, immersive demo, location-based XR product, or public-facing installation, JetStyle can help design the experience, test interaction mechanics, and make accessibility part of the product from the start. Book a call