Avatar Creation UX Vision
Building the avatar creation experience to empower Google & YouTube users to fully express, explore, and experiment with their virtual identity online.
| Client | Google & YouTube Partnership |
|---|---|
| Project Type | Discovery, Competitive Analysis, Synthesis |
| Role | Experience Design Lead |
| Team | Senior Visual Designer | Dylan Bobier |
|---|---|---|
| Research Lead | Brittany Nugent | |
| Creative Direction | Alex Safchuk | |
| Length | 6 months |
Two clients with a shared vision.
Google and YouTube approached Huge to design a unified avatar creation experience for users across their products & services.
Shared user flow model
We would be joining a multi-year collaborative effort to make avatar creation easy and accessible to all Google & YouTube users.
While each brand would ultimately have distinct avatars and applications, our team was asked to create a single, cohesive, minimum viable experience for both in parallel.
Shared user flow model
Because both would use the same models and asset library, defining a shared core data structure from the beginning would ensure interoperability and familiarity as the system scales.
Our MVP would define the “light” version of avatar customization that would then be built on and expanded with more use cases and features into a wider interoperable ecosystem.
Project Plan
We aligned on a three-phase plan to fully investigate, validate and address the project brief.
Phase 1: Discovery
Rapid immersion to clarify user needs and drive creative ideation.
Goal: Define experience principles and user flow to guide concept ideation.
Phase 2: Concept Development
Identify key opportunities and define the future experience.
Goal: Validate and narrow down experience concepts into MVP epics.
Phase 3: MVP Build
Refine the creative vision to bring the Avatar experience to life.
Goal: Build out and test MVP experience prototype and roadmap.
Each phase was designed to create, validate, and provide the inputs to plug into the next.
Goal: Define experience principles and user flow to guide concept ideation.
Goal: Validate and narrow down experience concepts into MVP epics.
Goal: Build out and test MVP experience prototype and roadmap.
We would explore concepts for both Google and YouTube in phases 1 and 2. For phase 3, we would design specifically for YouTube Shorts, preparing to pilot test the MVP with Google's Trusted Testers.
How do you do, fellow GloYos?
Google & YouTube gave us the critical user journeys we must address to outline the scope of what we would create. Everything else – from how to categorize assets to how a user would try on a new hairstyle – was up to us to figure out.
For inspiration, we discussed the best avatar systems we’d seen – both real and fictional. The team agreed that Cher Horowitz’s digital wardrobe in Clueless captured the easy-to-use, organized, yet inspiring vibe that we wanted to create.
A closet as iconic as the outfits
A closet as iconic as the outfits
But would a bit from a movie from 1995 resonate with users who never had to bother with VHS tapes or dial-up internet?
The Global Youth – or GloYos – are increasingly shaping tech and social media trends. They are more interested in avatars overall than older generations (and absolutely love YouTube!).
While I got to work checking out the competitive landscape, our research lead Brittany coordinated one-on-one interviews with 6 GloYo internet users.
Observations from the interviews helped to segment our target audience into personas defined by motivation, preferred use case, and degree of interest. The four personas – social maven, playful creator, influencer, and V-Tuber – lie on a spectrum from casual to power user.
Target personas on the user spectrum
Target personas on the user spectrum
On the high-use end, V-Tubers produce and stream content with avatars that are often custom modeled, rigged, and animated with motion capture.
More casual users do not have the same time or money to invest in avatar creation. Still, the V-Tuber mindset highlights the almost infinite possibilities that complete creative control can unlock.
Google & YouTube are better positioned to serve the remaining three personas, who are interested in avatars but not as motivated to create & customize them on their own.
We would need to balance the accessibility & ease-of-use needed to attract social mavens with the flexibility & control of customization required to stand out to & catch on with playful creators & influencers.
We wrote “How Might We” statements to summarize the themes and opportunities from user interviews:
01. How might we...
Offer customization options that help users connect their avatars to IRL feelings, interests and activities?
02. How might we...
Provide creation shortcuts that still give a sense of freedom and flexibility?
03. How might we...
Help users catalog past avatars and assets while still allowing for growth and change?
04. How might we...
Bring avatars to life by giving them greater dimensionality?
An expansive
virtual landscape.
We tried out the avatar creators from 30 different games, social platforms, and digital tools to understand the competitive landscape shaping our users’ expectations.
I evaluated the top 14 platforms in-depth across 40 different points to see how the work, even having our GloYos test drive some live with us.
Aligning my findings to the five stages of our user journey – discover, create, explore, manage, & beyond - allowed us to articulate insights to bring with us into brainstorming and concept creation.
01.
Discover
Context is Key
Explore natural entry points for users that express value and encourage creation.
Limit Barriers
Get users creating quickly and reduce drop points that can limit conversion.
Find them where you can use them
Disney DLV – How it works overlay
02.
Create
A Warm Start
Make it easy to create, but inspire users with possibility.
Use Familiar Patterns
Match user expectations and borrow from the real world.
Encourage Browsing
Make creation feel more like a game and less like a chore.
Increase Findability
Satisfy our user's hunt and peck behavior.
Bring it to Life
Living characters create a more emotional connection and ownership.
All Inclusive
Celebrate our differences and make all users feel represented and seen.
Beyond the Look
Edit more facets beyond physical appearance like voice, emotes, and event the environment.
Meta – Filters
TikTok – Face Tracking
Disney DLV – How it works overlay
03.
Explore
Set them Free
Make avatars “sticky” by maximizing their use on owned platforms and encourage extensibility to others as well.
Sharing is Caring
Users will find more new ways to use the creative tools we provide than we could ever imagine. Foster a community of sharing and exploration to encourage use.
A Whole New World
Build a dynamic world around our avatars or find ways to integrate them into our world.
Genies – New integrations & share studio
Genies – New integrations & share studio
04.
Manage
Keep it Fresh
Always keep avatars new, timely, and relevant to the current digital zeitgeist so that they don’t get stale.
As Dynamic as You
Our look is as dynamic as our personalities. Allow for our avatars to be ever-changing.
Retail Therapy
Establish a social marketplace that encourages users to explore new looks, share with others, and connect with real brands.
Snap – Seasonal Drops
Zepeto – Timed to IRL events
Genies – Generating Buzz
05.
& Beyond
Digital Ownership
Explore exclusive drops, limited edition partnerships, NFT ownership, trading and bartering whether monetized or not.
Next Level Tools
Invested users will seek more control and deeper ways to engage with the avatar platform. Find ways to feed the creativity.
Zepeto Studio – Templates
Genies – NFT Exclusivity
Roblox – Advanced Studio
-
Context is Key
Explore natural entry points for users that express value and encourage creation.
Limit Barriers
Get users creating quickly and reduce drop points that can limit conversion.
Find them where you can use them
Disney DLV – How it works overlay
-
A Warm Start
Make it easy to create, but inspire users with possibility.
Use Familiar Patterns
Match user expectations and borrow from the real world.
Encourage Browsing
Make creation feel more like a game and less like a chore.
Increase Findability
Satisfy our user's hunt and peck behavior.
Bring it to Life
Living characters create a more emotional connection and ownership.
All Inclusive
Celebrate our differences and make all users feel represented and seen.
Beyond the Look
Edit more facets beyond physical appearance like voice, emotes, and event the environment.
Meta – Filters
TikTok – Face Tracking
Samsung AR & Snap – Represent Disabilities
-
Set them Free
Make avatars “sticky” by maximizing their use on owned platforms and encourage extensibility to others as well.
Sharing is Caring
Users will find more new ways to use the creative tools we provide than we could ever imagine. Foster a community of sharing and exploration to encourage use.
A Whole New World
Build a dynamic world around our avatars or find ways to integrate them into our world.
Genies – New integrations & share studio
Samsung AR & home page
-
Keep it Fresh
Always keep avatars new, timely, and relevant to the current digital zeitgeist so that they don’t get stale.
As Dynamic as You
Our look is as dynamic as our personalities. Allow for our avatars to be ever-changing.
Retail Therapy
Establish a social marketplace that encourages users to explore new looks, share with others, and connect with real brands.
Snap – Seasonal Drops
Zepeto – Timed to IRL events
Genies – Generating Buzz
-
Digital Ownership
Explore exclusive drops, limited edition partnerships, NFT ownership, trading and bartering whether monetized or not.
Next Level Tools
Invested users will seek more control and deeper ways to engage with the avatar platform. Find ways to feed the creativity.
Zepeto Studio – Templates
Genies – NFT Exclusivity
Roblox – Advanced Studio
On average the 14 systems I looked at had 23 customization categories and took about 5 minutes to complete. But these data points varied depending on platform use case and how central avatars are to the core experience.
Beacons: Samsung AR, Meta, Zepeto, Genies
Comparing ease-of-use to level of customization afforded by each competitor suggested a negative coorrelation between the two main user needs.
But layering on the casual-to-power user continuum revealed a “sweet spot” between investment and reward and pinpointed beacons to take a closer look at.
Now that the team had a better understanding of how our users navigate avatar creation, we were ready to start finding solutions to our how might we statements.
The scope of our creation flow
Starting with the critical user journeys that Google & YouTube provided, I built a user flow mapping out the eight pages in scope for Phase 2.
experience principles
To close out Phase 1, the team held an experience principles workshop. These principles would guide us as we built out our design hypotheses into concepts for user testing.
We put together a product placemat starting with the primary user desire & value proposition ensuring that everything would ladder up to and reinforce that goal.
Pairing specific user needs to opportunities, we came up with the following four principles to guide us as we built out our design hypotheses into concepts for user testing:
Let Them Drive
Need: Users want control over the customizations that matter to them and want to ignore the things they don’t care about.
Opportunity: Give users the tools they need for self expression and be a catalyst for creation.
An Authentic You
Need: Users see their digital identity as an extenstion of personal identity and strive to celebrate what makes them unique.
Opportunity: Use our global reach and ubiquity to celebrate diversity and welcome users to represent their unique self without reproach.
A Living Platform
Need: Users move at the speed of internet culture and require the same of their social tools.
Opportunity: Connect avatars across our product ecosystem and beyond to make the internet a more expressive community.
Get Familiar
Need: Users prioritize utility and value when it comes to the tools they use to create. They want the experience to be a natural extension of their mind’s eye.
Opportunity: Create an experience that puts users at the center and capitalizes on the expectations that they have about products from Google and YouTube.
From vision to reality.
With Phase 1 and discovery complete, it was time to start solutioning. See how we turned our idea into an app in Phase 2: Concept Resonance (coming soon!).