“Capture Your Experience at This Moment”: Collecting Concurrent User Experience Data in Immersive Virtual Environment

Environmental User Experience (UX) data collection is essential for user research, enabling evidence-based design decisions. However, traditional retrospective methods like micro-phenomenological interviews suffer from recall inaccuracies and memory distortions. Concurrent UX data collection methods with environmental contexts are promising but lack in-depth investigation. To examine this potential, we conducted a formative study with 34 participants, identifying design goals such as natural interaction, in-situ annotation, and spatial-temporal coupling. We developed JourneyCapturer, an interactive tool that fulfills these goals to integrate concurrent annotation within Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE), enabling real-time UX data capture within contextual scenarios. Using a mixed-method design, we comparatively evaluated concurrent IVE annotations, retrospective interviews, and the combined method with 20 participants, demonstrating how JourneyCapturer improves UX collection processes and outcomes. Our findings suggest that a consciously proactive concurrent IVE method with a first-person perspective advances UX research, offering implications for expert collaboration, multi-modal analytics, and IVE-based field studies.