A Metaverse Experience Design Primer

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The metaverse is going to be the next frontier in customer experience design. Here are three principles that will help you prepare.

The metaverse–or whatever descriptor ends up addressing the AR/VR phenomenon that connects people with virtual experiences–is coming. While it is not always the case that simply building a technology platform will lure an audience, it’s undeniable that the world’s most dominant technology brands are making big bets on immersive experiences

Meta, formerly Facebook, continues to invest millions of dollars in the platform. So much that its financials took a dive and directly resulted in substantial layoffs across its organization, except for the teams working on the metaverse. Apple is rumored to have a headset in its product pipeline. And Google has already released a consumer AR product: Google Glass back in 2013. CEO Sundar Pichai hinted in 2022 that several additional products are in the works.

While the world’s largest tech companies are defining the metaverse’s landscape, global consultancies such as Accenture, IBM, and McKinsey are providing guidance to help brands engage the customers they will find there. In fact, McKinsey famously predicted that over the next ten years, the metaverse will generate $5 trillion USD in value. And Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, anticipates that the metaverse, fueled by AI, will fundamentally change the notion of work and raise the global standard of living.

So, intrepid designers, ignore the metaverse at your own peril. As students of the customer experience, we should view this as yet another opportunity to engage people in the places they occupy, both virtual and physical. In order to stay relevant, you’ll need to consider how your approach to design makes the best use of the opportunities the metaverse will provide.

We’ve always been learners

The metaverse is just another wave of technological evolution that has moved us from the primitive websites of the 1990s to the responsive web, native apps, and gesture-based experiences now at our command.

Remember that it was the addition of the Document Object Model (DOM) to HTML development that allowed for increased interactivity and motion to the early web. Then the 2007 launch of the iPhone meant we were now designing for small screens and gestures, giving rise to the current responsive, mobile-first approach to user experience.

Most recently leaner, more responsive development frameworks such as React now give us the ability to design applications that easily move from touchpoint to touchpoint. The point is clear: Great experience designers evolve with technology. In fact, it is one of the reasons that many of us remain active in the field: We like to learn.

With the metaverse, we’ll be asked to design something different. Likely, our work will parallel game design but extend beyond the capacity to entertain. We will design experiences that allow people to accomplish, learn, and, most importantly, connect. Fear not: The tools and tactics that you’ve used to deliver 2D experiences will help you prepare.

First Principle 1: It is immersive

Veteran designers might recall the immersive website Second Life while junior designers may be familiar with Minecraft and Roblox. And virtually all designers are familiar with immersive first-person gaming experiences. Of many things that connect these experiences, the first and most important for designers is that they are immersive.

What does that mean and why is that important? People engage these platforms through an avatar, a virtual self that does the doing controlled by the real self via interface, gestures, or biometric signal. Players immerse themselves in the digital world and engage with others doing the same, along with engaging tools that allow them to simulate actions.

Whether the avatar is an anthropomorphic human such as in Second Life and many video games or an unseen avatar as is possible in Minecraft and Roblox, the key to your metaverse design strategy must be to include the right tools that allow for successful task completion. Without fully exploring what it means to enable action by an agent, the experience will feel inauthentic and likely awkward.

Said another way, metaverse experiences are fundamentally characterized by an agent acting as an extension of the person engaging them. And this is critically different from designing typical transactional experiences where it is the user acts directly as the agent responsible for the experience.

In the typical experiences we design for websites and apps, we recognize the person directly driving the experience through a somewhat ubiquitous interface: A keyboard, a gesture, or even a mouse. In the metaverse, there are typically tools in the metaverse itself that accomplish the actions, even though those tools are themselves commanded by traditional input mechanisms.

Recognizing this difference allows us as designers to think more clearly about the tools necessary that grant people the agency necessary to do the things they wish to do in our immersive environments. Want to learn more about what this looks like? Talk to just about any Gen Y gamer. They’ve grown up with Minecraft and Roblox, so the notion of a virtual world is already embedded in how they use technology.

They will tell you that immersive experiences can offer a bit of agency and confidence that might not exist in the real world, so consider including in your metaverse design strategy features that enable onerous or inconvenient real-world tasks. (I, for one, would love to see a metaverse department of motor vehicles.)

Lesson 2: It is tethered to the real world

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Though virtual, the metaverse remains tethered to the real world. Even though its composition is fundamentally defined by binary 1s and 0s inside a graphics card, the experience should retain analogous metaphors to the physical realities of the perceived world. So in order for us to properly design in the metaverse, animation is essential.

If animation is a new tool in your kit, you’ll do well to start with an understanding of its principles. Disney’s 12 Principles of Animation are an essential read for first-timers and a welcome refresher for more seasoned motion designers. These principles demonstrate that animation uses many cues from Newtonian mechanics while often exaggerating motion for narrative emphasis.

Beyond understanding that objects and avatars move through virtual space using animation that extends the physical principles of how the world works, digital strategy for the metatverse should include the idea of a digital twin. The idea here is that as we consider new digital and physical products, we should build a replica of the product to be deployed in the metaverse.

McKinsey advises that enterprises look to the metaverse for value creation by modeling systems and processes in the metaverse to find efficiencies. Doing so requires a replica of each component in the current, or even proposed, process.

Consider a manufacturer of skis, for example. As designers consider new models, they would be wise, according to McKinsey, to build a digital replica of the ski not only for product testing but also for consumer testing (as Diamler is doing.)

Beyond just allowing product testers to confirm the right build specifications and for consumers to sample the product virtually, additional value can be derived from building out a complete digital twin of the product’s supply chain story. From sourcing components to building and shipping to retailers and consumers, the metaverse allows for detailed modeling of every step in the process to find the most efficient paths. Image this same idea applied to, for example, a global clothing retailer. The complexities of the supply chain combined with evolving consumer tastes are ideal targets for digital twins and the metaverse to find efficiencies, as well as predict disruptions and opportunities.

So we see that the metaverse is likely to share characteristics of the real world, especially in enterprise applications. But for consumers experiences, does the metaverse need to retain exact physical cues to the perceived world? In a word, no. There will be plenty of opportunity in the metaverse to veer from the physics of motion to allow its inhabitants to do the things they want and need to do. And this leads us to the next principle: Storytelling will give us insight into the nature of the experiences our users prefer.

Lesson 3: It is a story written by its participants

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When we consider the functional components necessary to design successfully for the metaverse, the most important of them enable their users to accomplish the tasks they intend to address. Understanding the arc of the story in the metaverse is not very different from how we do it for more traditional digital experiences.

In short, we understand people and allow them to tell us their stories. Empathy maps, persona documentation, and storyboards are the tools you’ll need to build a deep and confident understanding of what people want when they engage in your immersive experience.

It’s likely that since many metaverse experiences will be transactional you’ll need to focus your empathy study to understand the agent interacting with the user, as well. Consider a typical banking experience we’ll see in the metaverse. The customer will engage with bank staff. Should that staff member, as an agent of the bank, exhibit a personality? This might be an opportunity to craft a branded experience by doing so.

How agents react to and engage customers in transactional metaverse experiences could be the difference. It’s also quite likely that each agent may be crafted uniquely for engaging a particular customer data the bank possesses. If the bank, for example, were to know a customer’s location, income, relationship status, and credit score, it may choose to invoke an agent that can engage its customers in ways more favorable than a generic agent used for all customers.

These agents will be driven by aligning customer data with AI-enabled agents with the ambition of driving business value. And as designers, we’ll need to continue our push to understand all of these characters. We’ll also need to be sure that the agent with whom our users interact reflects personality characteristics consistent with the brands we support.

Takeaways

If we know little else about designing digital experiences it is that we must first understand the people we want to engage with them. And that won’t change. In fact, that will only get more important as brands rush to capitalize on the value-creation opportunities in the metaverse.

Knowing who will use our designs, what they seek to accomplish, and the emotional contexts in which they engage our work are — and will continue to be —the first objective in creating great metaverse experiences.

What will change is that our designs will be based in an animated world occupied by avatars and AI-driven agents. People will engage these avatars to accomplish tasks not terribly dissimilar to those enabled outside the metaverse: Banking, designing and producing all manner of physical and virtual products, shopping, and connecting with friends.

And it’s up to us as designers to make sure our work drives toward the three goals that have always been the hallmarks ofgreat design: Useful, usable, and compelling.

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