xun liu 
Seamlessly moving between a spectrum of physical and digital identities, it has become and norm to construct multiple representations of ourselves.We want to develop new social scenarios for the increasingly mixed reality world and find a way to keep IMVU users more engaged with the IMVU community.In April 2019, we started a project sponsored by IMVU. The whole duration was 14 weeks.
The infoBox is a virtual social chat room that aims to inspire and educate users through role-playing experiences. We devote ourselves to promoting the passion for communicating and the personal growth of users.
The scope of this project was to create an immersive application. Our design team consisted of three people: Shane Park, interaction designer; May Chen: graphic designer. I focused more on User Research, User-centered Design, UX/UI design, and prototyping.
This project was about using the current creation tools available within IMVU's platform to design a new way of interacting on the platform. We want to develop a sharing, engaging, and playful chat room for IMVU users. InfoBox aims to boost users' interaction with each other by providing a better user experience environment with those that hold similar interests. Driving more traffic to the platform.
Users get information and knowledge directly from the environment by exploring the vlog experience room's props and actions. It motivates users to share experiences and feelings with the communities.
" I need a place to help me escape from worries "
We all looking for a way to escape from worries.
Escape is significant, but social interaction is meaningful too.
People are looking to connect with others.
To answer how uniforms influence people's behavior in the real world, we observed and interviewed people who have to wear a costume when they were working.
We experience role-playing in reality through wear costumes to better understand how uniforms affect people's psychology and change their behavior.
"It is hard to have a conversation last three minutes."
We explored the IMVU world and interviewed IMVU users. I found IMVU chat room, unengaging users, enough. Users said they got bored quickly and complained it is hard to make and keep friends since it is hard to have a conversation last three minutes. They didn't know what to talk about or start a conversation. When they enter a chat room, sometimes, nobody even bothers to speak.
We noticed that there is a missing component of "social groups" in IMVU. Creating the groups that users can aspire to join can trigger a like-minded conversation about the topic and inspire users to connect and even be friends.
Our formula consists of combining to role play with career options to motivate, entertain, and educate. Merging role play with education helps deepen a person's understanding and opens their minds to an idea they haven't considered before. We allow users to explore realistic situations in a fun, engaging digital environment by interacting with others and learning from the environment. They can experience and trial different strategies in a supported way.
IMVU users are interested in social media, roleplaying, and making money through digital space. Vlog is a new trend and one of the most popular careers for young people. As a result, we decided to make a vlogger experience room.
It took several rounds of iterations to display the design of the chat room.
We sketched countless ideas and brainstormed various possibilities and prototypes to test.
Iteration I
Iteration II
Iteration III
I. Before
After we made the room's first version design, we invited IMVU users to do the user test and give us some feedback. We got a couple of insights to work with further on in the design process.
The findings were immensely helpful in improving the experience to be less wordy and more visual.
II. After
We re-iterated the design based on the user's feedback.
A makeup vlogger experiences room to roleplay as a makeup vlogger to shooting a video try to wear lipsticks.
A food vlogger experience room to allowed roleplay as
a food vlogger to shooting a video to talk about food.
A travel vlogger experience room that roleplay as a travel vlogger to shooting a video in Paris.
We launched our minimal viable product on IMVU platform. It's fascinating and terrific to see the users' live reaction to the environment we created in IMVU platform. Throughout the test, we see people role-played around the room and started chatting with each other. Some of them provided us a lot of helpful feedback, including the furniture's arrangement and purposes and so on. Compare to doing tons of research by googling and reading in the library, real-time user testing is more efficient and practical because all the advice comes from our actual user base.
To get more intuitive feedback, IMVU went online to our rooms and recorded user data. The figure shows the number of chats per day and the average chat time per day (seconds) of users.
By working with other people, you are less likely to be biased. When we design the IMVU rooms, my teammates provided interesting ideas that I had not considered before. This led to a better immersive user experience.
With the parallel between IMVU and real-world experiences, we suppose that creating a marketing program where users can experiencing career interests in a room designed for a particular profession. Then they could be tested through an external (Google) form to transform their interests become real-life professions. Learning can be doing through staged experience.
👀 Thanks for viewing! 😊 I hope you enjoy this project!
