My Process
As we were working in a short time frame (four weeks), the team was looking to iterate quickly. I broke up my work into 2 parts.
Part 1 - User discovery and understanding the problem:
Conversations with the team led me to understand their perspective of the problem, state of players, and the Horizon World platform. I decided to utilize a qualitative approach to understand user attitudes, experiences, and motivations — as the goals of player engagement and puzzle discovery are best understood through direct observation.
❖ Understanding the problem - 3 days
I visited multiple worlds in the Horizon Worlds app and interacted with players. I also met with the team in VR to go through their experience, understand where they were in the development phase of the project, and to work with the team to create a few hypotheses, or assumptions, about the app and how users interact in Horizon Worlds. The intention was to obtain additional player behavior patterns and observed issues I can work off of, as this was my first time working in VR. Our assumptions are below.
1) Any confusion or unclear task(s) can easily be perceived as a bug, leading users to quickly give up a task.
2) Many worlds are 'hang out' areas where there aren't many world interactions. This leads to users failing to be curious and play with world objects.
3) Many new users are unclear how they should interact with objects in Horizon Worlds, unless explicitly told/shown.
❖ User discovery - 2 days
I visited Hub Worlds for user interviews (Hub Worlds are open worlds designed for players to meet other players and join in short multiplayer games). My goal was to talk to about 10 users to gain insight on their experiences in Horizon Worlds, pain points, motivations, as well as to test my team's three assumptions above. I also wanted to collect data to create personas for Horizon Worlds players. I aimed for 10 players because I believe it would provide a happy medium between working quickly, as the client wanted, and allowing room for a healthy amount of feedback in a medium that is new to me. I decided against recording these sessions to increase the comfort level of interviewees in this new space, encourage honesty about their experiences, and increase the amount of users willing to be interviewed.
As a side note, recordings can play a key role in supporting design decisions and data analysis. In this case as the team trusted the UX process and were more focused on fast iterations, so I decided against recording sessions in this instance.
I synthesized feedback in an empathy map, created two personas, and presented my findings to the team in Horizon Worlds during a VR meeting. Below are a few key details learned.
Initial Research Findings:
- Players age ranges were from 22 to 36, most players in their late 20s.
- Most players used male avatars (7 male avatars 3 female avatars).
- The most common reason given for participating in the Horizon World's app is to 'check out the space' (to experience the app, general curiosity about VR, and the capabilities of Horizon Worlds).
- The most popular, or favorite worlds, are shooting or fighting experiences.
-The most common pain point is not knowing what to do in a world, and object interactions that appear as bugs (where player's are sure if a world interaction should be expected, or if a genuine bug caused the interaction).
Personas:
Name: Alex
Gender: Male
Age: 24
Familiarity with VR: new
Goals: check out worlds, meet people
Pain points: Not sure what to do, bugs, not sure how to find fun worlds, don’t know people on the platform
The team preferred to focus on the Alex persona for this project, because Meta wanted teams to focus on engaging new users.
Name: Jen
Gender: Female
Age: 29
Familiarity with VR: Experienced VR before Horizon Worlds, or heavy user of Horizon Worlds
Goals: understand the capabilities of VR, meet new people
Pain points: Bugs, loading time, not sure how to find fun worlds
Part 2 - Prototyping and Implementation:
-Compared task success rate and time to completion to the initial experience as a means of quantitatively assess progress of our 3 goals. - Confidently determine that the original 3 assumptions from phase 2 above are true.
Below is a breakdown of the work done for prototyping and implementation.
❖ Prototype - 1 week
-I learned how to build models for the team to work off of.
-I held multiple solo and collaborative modeling sessions
-I began prep for, and updated the team, on my preparations for next set of playtesting sessions - inviting teammates to ask questions and become involved in any aspect of my work (if they wanted to!).
-Lead a feedback session for additions and changes to the world, based off of UX findings, my 3 recommendations, and the team's vision.
❖ Continued testing - 1 week
-After models were approved by the team, they were set in the world.
-I gathered players fitting our persona for playtesting sessions.
-Task success/time to completion data was collected for quantitative comparisons.
-User Interviews were also utilized for qualitative data comparisions.
❖ Implement - 1 week
-After seeing desired improvement on our team goals, models were published to the public version world.
User Interviews
Initial user interviews took place in Hub Worlds (hang out areas of Horizon Worlds). A second round of users were obtained via hub worlds and word-of-mouth.
My goal during user interviews were to:
-Understand player motivations
-What experiences/mechanics they find 'fun'
-What aspects of VR design add to puzzle discovery
-Pain points new players experienced in Horizon Worlds experiences
At the end of each interview I asked if there was anything else about VR/Oculus/Horizon Worlds we didn't touch on. Below are few key questions I asked in all interviews:
❖ What brought you to try out Horizon Worlds?
❖ Do you have a favorite (type of) world? Why?
❖ What are your impressions of this world?
❖ Are there any movements or mechanics you find uncomfortable?
❖ Tell me about an experience that was frustrating.
Competitive Analysis
A competitive analysis allow me to:
(1) Experience similar worlds to the one the team is building (to view object interactivity, puzzles, music, and atmosphere)
(2) Spend time with the team engaging in constructive conversations about VR experiences and their world.
The team an I discussing world events, interactions, pros and cons of other experiences as we traversed them. I treated the sessions as informal interviews (I created an interview script for myself to ensure I asked key questions in each world). See example below.
❖ What are your first impressions of this world?
❖ What strikes you about this world?
❖ How would you rate this world? Why?
❖ Any ideas or mechanics you'd like to see in the BKGS from this world?
Assumed Blockers
(1) My biggest worry was applying my skills in UX/UI into a medium that was completely new to me, as I couldn't find secondary research to utilize as guidance.
To guard against this issue, I made the time to ask the team and players key questions about the Horizon Worlds, it's use-cases, interacting with others in this medium vs meeting people outside of the app has been, etc before beginning my work. These conversations gave me a good basis to understand the medium and plan how to best apply my UX research skills to this medium.
(2) I was worried about attaining players for users interviews and playtesting.
In this case, feedback from the team on where to best find players and my years of customer service/client support experiences allowed me to quickly resolve this assumed blocker. It was actually really easy walking up to players and starting a conversation. In order to be transparent and prompt players to be open I:
- Always began conversations by introducing myself and saying hi, followed up by an easy question (e.g. - "how's it going? / "have you visited this experience before?").
- When I felt the player was comfortable I let them know I'm working on a world with a small team and if it was alright with them I'd love to hear about their thoughts of the Horizon Worlds app so far.
(3) I thought my acclimation into the Horizon Worlds app might take more time than I wanted to spend.
I learned that traveling worlds, creating test worlds, and building 3D models came a lot easier than I thought — my developer background definitely helped here! Meta also had a nice tutorial on building in Horizon Worlds. I didn't get to go through a few more complicated tutorials due to a bug in my user profile, but I ended up not needing those skills to complete my work (scripting and advanced animations). The team was happy to take on advanced scripting and I was able to learn more about animations from the team during build sessions well enough to build appropriate models. Building was actually really fun, and the team noted I picked up concepts pretty quickly, which was great (I also spent time reviewing videos on YouTube and other sources in preparation).
Project Learnings
This was my first project working in VR and my first time working in Horizon Worlds. I had a great time learning about the platform and utilizing my skills in a completely different space. I was able to apply a lot of my experience working in different spaces in tech that definitely helped me hit the ground running. My main takeaways were:
❖ Always ask questions, and keep your own assumptions in check
❖ Every interaction is an opportunity to learn and get new ideas
❖ Be ready to iterate, and work through what that means to the project before making any moves
❖ Users are almost always happy to talk and test — be open and honest about what you're looking for
