Overview
User
Flow
Journey
Map
Heuristic
Creation
Validation
User Interviews
Personas
Participatory Design
World
Creation
User
Research
RESEARCH FINDINGS
Coming in to this capstone project, my team members and I had little to no sense of the state of diversity and inclusivity within the metaverse. In order to learn more and diversify our knowledge on this topic, we read several articles, conducted a competitive analysis of several different experiences and apps, created two surveys (one for individuals who utilize VR and another for creators within Horizon Worlds) who and hosted several field observations with our friends.
Takeaways from user research:
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Some apps restricted incorporating diversity through having purposes that limited interaction, being color-blind, and allowing participants to pretend to be someone who they are not.
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Users of Horizon Worlds believe that there is more that Meta Horizon can do in order to incorporate/ facilitate diversity.
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Some creators believed that diversity in the world is completely determined by the users, while Horizon Worlds/the creator tool is merely a tool that they can use.
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Some field observation participants faced racist stereotypical phrases like "dab me up brother" as soon as they entered the world.
User Interviews
After conducting our preliminary research, we decided to interview some of our survey respondents in order to get more information from them about how they use the creator tools, their levels of experiences, problems that they faced while creating, and their general sense of diversity and cultural element incorporation in their world.
Takeaways from interviews:
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Two of five interviewees had not considered adding cultural elements to their worlds
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These individuals said that there are several aspects of culture that they could add to their worlds from food and portion sizes to music and clothing
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Community and networking between creators is important in order to raise awareness of different cultures, telling stories of the past in order to infuse authenticity into their worlds rather than throwing random elements together and calling it culture
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Several interviewees were unknowingly misappropriating culture through building worlds of different cultures that weren't their own.
User
Flow
Overview
Validation
User Interviews
Personas
World
Creation
User
Research
Journey
Map
Heuristic
Creation
Participatory Design
User Flows
In order to have a better understanding ofthe technicalities and options that the creation process has, one of my group members screenshared the world creation process and I took notes on every single button, icon, page, option, and user input that the team member came across while creating a world. From there, we used a Figma Jamboard in order to create a flow of everything a user does in the process of creating and editing a world from beginning to end. This also helped us explore and experience some of the problems that or interviewees were facing in order to come up with potential solutions we could propose and design for implementation.
Personas
In order to create personas, we went through our interview analysis to find commonalities between our interviewees and get a sense of what they were doing in terms of diversity and cultural representation. We decided on creating two personas to represent the range of experience levels that our interviewees had. Megan Tusk, as you can see from image 1 in the gallery above, represents a beginner creators who are trying to find a sense of belonging and create meaningful, but appropriate worlds that reflect different perspectives while struggling to to own her identity while building her world. On the otherhand, Gabriel represents the more advanced creators and his goal is to help beginners learn the importance of collaboration to help promote diversity in the Metaverse without misappropriating culture.
Journey Map
We created scenarios inspired by our user personas to come up with a common experience that typical users would encounter. We decided to go with a user asking a collaborator to help create a world dedicated to representing the user’s culture and a user who wanted to edit their old world and add objects that better represent themselves and their culture. We then thought of obstacles that the users might encounter while going through their journeys that could affect their feelings. With everything decided, we created our map and thought a line graph, represented with a face that shows expressions at every phase, would best show the different emotions that the user would identify with at that current time.
Participatory Design
After creating our user journey maps, our goal was to create four heuristics which will be seen in the next stage to help guide creators in making ethical decisions and making sure that they were sticking true to themselves when creating. In order to make sure that our heuristics were effective, we created a survey and reached out to our friends and posted in FaceBook groups to get individuals to draw and write or speak about objects that represent their culture. These objects would later be created within Horizon Worlds utilizing the four heuristics.
User
Flow
User
Research
Participatory Design
Journey
Map
Heuristic
Creation
Overview
Validation
Personas
User Interviews
World
Creation
Heuristic Creation
From our interviews, field observations, and shadowing sessions, we noticed that creators were saying diversity is created by the users themselves and the creators tools are merely just a tool used to create objects. We wanted to create a type of tool that can help creators think more about the items they are creating and whether those objects are misappropriated or not. We decided that for our tool, we are going to create puzzle pieces that represent different heuristics that people can use as guidelines while creating objects from different culture. These puzzle pieces will have questions that
will appear in front of the person asking them deep questions. These questions should help the creator think more about their reasoning and purpose for why they are making these objects.
World Creation
We tested these heuristics by creating objects from different cultures that we received from our participatory design. We made sure to have the heuristics in the back of our mind when creating to make sure that we were creating the objects exactly like the author had sketched and we were not misappropriating their culture. We were able to create many objects from symbols to different food! We also made it so that when people grab on to the object, it produces a sound that explains why each of these objects represent their culture or identity. We also made a couple decisions in the placement of ojects. For example, at the beginning, we put the Hamsa (the hand with the evil eye) on top of the mountain but noticed that that it was too prominent and we did not want to make it seem that we were focusing on a single culture so we placed it in the plaza of diverse artifacts.
Validation
To validate everything we did, we first went back to our survey and contacted the people we got sketches from and ask whether we recreated their vision. We had some great feedback stating that we created their objects really well, and we had some that needed some improvement like the oil lamp, where the designer stated that we could have added some more cultural colors. This just meant that we had to go back to our heuristics and do it again.
REFLECTION
If I had to choose three words to describe this project, I would say it was challenging, intellectually stimulating, and rewarding at the same time. It was challenging because we had several noshows for different stages of our milestones so we had to think of ways to tactfully incentivize and involve individuals in data collection for future processes. It was intellectually stimulating because we started out with a very broad prompt in which we could do almost everything as there was so many different possibilities to go in but we had to select one. It was rewarding because we went through over 14 different research and design methodologies in less than 6 months.What I learned from this process is that pivots will be common and it’s important to apply life skills in order to persevere and work in fast paced environments.