When you’re designing facial capture protocols, there are so many things you need to consider to prevent poor quality data yields and participant fatigue.

Factors like…
* what poses you choose
* how you sequence the poses
* how you explain/show the poses, etc.
…make a huge difference in how your sessions can turn out.

Working with major game and tech companies, it’s quite obvious that people are recycling similar, dated protocols. Considering the present purpose of many captures, such old protocols are often clunky with illogical pose combinations, redundant expressions, and inefficient flow.

There is an endless list of dos and don’ts for facial capture design, but here are a few general pointers:

* Be use case-minded! If you’re creating a facial capture protocol, you need to think about what you’re designing it for. If your main goal is to capture data for a product aimed toward co-working, you’d likely want to prioritize prosocial, collaborative, and everyday expressions. In these cases, you probably don’t need to stress test every possible unsightly “scream” pose.

* Design for logical flow. Group similar expressions together, e.g. brow-based poses, eye-based poses, etc. Go from easy to difficult within that section. If you go from easy to difficult across ALL poses, you will end up having your user jump around from eyes to mouth to brows to jaw. Grouping expressions strategically not only helps with user fatigue and comprehension, but it also opens up opportunity to order your poses in a way that allows you to describe and build off previous ones.

* Make sure your example imagery and descriptions actually match the target pose. Too many times, I see prompts like “raise brows without widening eyes” – yet the actor in the shot is clearly widening their eyes. A large percentage of users will do as they see, not as they hear or read. So, don’t give conflicting instructions, and make sure you rigorously review the example poses!