About Utopia VR
Utopia VR is a company that utilizes virtual experiences, whether in VR, desktop, or mobile, to improve virtual collaboration and boost productivity for businesses. The team creates and manages private virtual spaces for clients, and designs tailored experiences for their needs.
Note: Utopia VR's products are paid services. I have been asked to refrain from disclosing details about their offerings. Therefore, I will provide limited product information and mockups.
Team
1 UX Designer (me)
2 Full-stack Developers
1 Product Manager
My Role
User Research
UI Design
UX Design
The Challenge
The problem was straightfoward: the current onboarding process didn't adequately guide new users in navigating the virtual space or showcase the available features. We needed to create a new onboarding experience to address these issues.
Additionally, we wanted to create a learning centre on our website. This section would offer more detailed information to help with onboarding.
Personas
After discussions with the marketing team, we identified our primary customers and their key characteristics:
Salespeople in MLM (multi-level marketing)
Typically males in their 40s and 50s
Not apt with technology
Likely did not have AR/VR experience
Likely did not have first-person gaming experience
Meetings were typically focused on presentations
However, our primary customers were not the only people who would interact with our product. We identified 2 types of users based on the 2 main use cases:
Salespeople, our primary customers
These were hardworking users who were willing to invest time and effort to learn our technology, despite limited experience.
They would use our product extensively.
They were our direct customers, who purchased our virtual rooms.
These individuals were the potential clients of the presenters
They might not be aware beforehand that the meeting would be in a virtual room
They were unlikely to interact with our product until the actual meeting.
Identifying these user types was crucial to creating an effective onboarding process. Logically, we needed to design for the second type of users, and ensure that they could attend the meetings smoothly.
Formulating The Content
Before we began to build the content, we met with the development team. In order to attain feasibility and effectiveness, we established the following requirements:
The onboarding should teach all users without having different variations.
It needed to be as succinct as possible to not obstruct the meetings.
To achieve these goals, we figured that we needed to organize the onboarding from the simplest to the most advanced features, and provide exit points so that the users could stop when they obtained the information they needed, and join the meeting. Thus, we organized the onboarding information into 4 sections in the following order:
Navigation
Interaction
Customize the room
Host a meeting
The learning centre would have the corresponding articles to the sections.
User Flow
An attendee who entered the virtual room for the first time would only need to learn about navigation to smoothly participate in a meeting. Interaction would be optional if time permitted. And room customization and hosting a meeting were only meant for presenters.
The Design
In the virtual room, we presented the onboarding with the following considerations:
small, digestible pieces of information
manageable number of instructions per section
clear and consistent navigation
easy exits so the user was never trapped
The learning centre corresponded to the onboarding sections so it was easier for users to look things up.
The Results
When the project was completed, Utopia VR was re-strategizing its product direction. As a result, not many new users were exposed to the new onboarding process. However, our customer support team led several Q&A sessions with our clients in the meantime. And they found the onboarding process to be very clear and helpful in teaching our clients about our features.
Key Learnings
It was challenging to connect with real users for research and testing because Utopia VR was still building and launching its products. To overcome this limitation, we obtained feedback from participants similar to our target personas, even if they weren't our actual clients. Additionally, we learned to leverage the expertise of our marketing team, who had considerable experience working with individuals who aligned with our personas.