Company:
Role:
Design Lead
Period:
2020 – 2021
Category:
Social, Metaverse
Goals
Engaging
Build an engaging social metaverse experience.
Innovative
Experiment with modern mechanics and innovate to lift the needle.
Safe
Build a safe place for Gen-Z to hang out and meet new friends.
My Contribution
As a player-coach, I built and managed a design team of 4 while leading projects hands-on.
Individual Contributor
Manager
🤝 Team building
🏋️♀️ Training
⏰ Project management
🎯 Goal alignment
📝 Research and testing
🎨 Branding
Onboarding
A seamless onboarding experience was a must. I collaborated closely with Product Managers and Engineers to ensure the design met the product/technical requirements and user needs. Here are a few unique approaches.
- Avatar customization was embedded up-front because the A/B testing revealed that it increased the registration completion rate by 6%.
- The user’s verified phone number was required instead of the email address because most target audience (~70%) preferred their number for password recovery.
Chat
Chat needed to work flawlessly while minimizing its interruption to user interactions in 2D space on a tiny mobile screen.
I conducted competitive research on dozens of apps and games with chat mechanisms and built an interaction model that met those needs.
The intricate detail, such as sequencing, timing, and micro-interactions, was critical for this to work. I fine-tuned the design through prototyping.
The mockups and prototypes were insufficient to get across the nuances for accurate implementation. It needed to be broken down into manageable chunks and more specifications on how they work together. Here is the initial design brief I created for project planning and scoping.
Data showed that retention had much room for improvement, and the user interviews revealed that over 50% of the users had difficulty breaking the ice when they met new people. To address this, I designed the “Quick Chat” feature that lists the commonly used ice-breakers.
Gamification
The most frequent user feedback was that they wanted more activities on the platform. In-depth interviews revealed that their needs boiled down to the lack of immediate goals. Along with multiplayer games, the team also wanted to explore ways to improve engagement with gamification throughout the product.
I conducted competitive research to learn successful mechanics from popular games among the age group and distilled them into the following 3 features.
XP and Levels
Like the familiar game mechanic, it was designed to create a sense of achievement based on various user activities throughout the user journey.
Kudo
Designed to promote positive user behavior and build a quantifiable reputation, Kudo is a soft currency users would get every day they log in to give out to another user.
Tutorial
As we introduced unique features, we learned it was not immediately understandable for our users. So we wanted to build a simple tutorial that’s adaptable for other upcoming features.
The feedback from the beta user group was very positive and increased D7 retention rate by 23%.
Design System
Keeping the design in sync with the latest and the greatest elements was vital for a newly formed team for a new product.
I bootstrapped the design system inspired by Atomic Design Methodology and managed it for 2 years.
