Avakin Life Discovery Lab

Problem

Avakin Life is a 3D virtual simulation game. It was one of the first games with a Metaverse. Its players explore multiple locations, make friends, and attend events and virtual parties together. They usually have many avatars, which personify different aspects of their personality, style, or intimate desires. This means their in-game persona might not be close to their real selves. Also, Avakin Life has an average of 1 million players daily, coming from many countries, ages, and socio-economic profiles. One could say it’s a UX Research nightmare since it’s nearly impossible to have truly representative samples of players at first glance. Many games conduct research with only American or English players, usually where the game’s studio headquarters is. But this of course skews results and only satisfies this section of players. I was worried about the ecology of my research in terms of context, representativity, and user identity.

Also, the Product and Content departments wanted a more cyclical and systematic flow of feedback from players that could be robust and trustworthy since they were creating new content on a weekly basis. By content I mean events, gifts, challenges, new locations (houses, party venues), and products to sell in-game.

So I had to come up with a way to deliver fast and systematic user feedback, with a high ecological internal validity, and covering all user profiles and contexts.

What was done

Traditional UX research is generally done by inviting users to a lab, where they are commonly asked to execute tasks and think aloud while interacting with some object or system. This can be further extended with interviews or questionnaires. The other option comes from Anthropology, where the researcher goes to the user and observes (participating or not) how this user interacts with that same object or system but in more natural conditions.

For the challenges I had, I opted to go for a more ethnographic approach: going where players are and see them in action. But in order to make the research reliable and robust it had to comply with certain rules to avoid parasite variables. For example, if I wanted to collect feedback about a new space, I had to guarantee that participants were isolated from other groups (the space being empty) and that they all started and ended their experience from and in the same place.

To assure the robustness of all research activities, I built the Discovery Lab. Not I. I had to convince many people of the need for this lab. A whole process was established to create a secure space inside the game where only my invitees could enter and to allow us (me and the participants) to travel to any location in the game, being that location automatically empty upon our arrival. For participants, the experience of this type of traveling was pure magic, and they expressed feeling so special to be part of it. Also, studio artists had to create the lab itself (image below), which was amazingly beautiful, cozy, and warming.

It was a beautiful dome-shaped house, set deep in the mountains, where we could all sit and chat, or we could go upstairs and have new objects there for participants to interact with. While this was happening, I was using User Testing to record all their behaviors/comments and also collecting raw data from the game engine (behaviors, chat, private chats between them).

Then, we would do our travelings to other game locations. I had my own avatar, that resembled my real appearance.

But the easiest part was to create the experimental designs for each research activity. The process was in fact the most challenging achievement.

Besides what I already mentioned about the inception of the Discovery Lab, I had to create, refine and maintain a continuous process with Customer Support to invite, talk to and keep track of participants. For example, I had to ensure players only participated in research activities every 3 months. We used a specific Discord channel to communicate with past, present, and future participants. Then, I also had to establish a process with the Content department whenever I wanted to invite players to a new research activity. I needed them to publish a banner and post in-game with a CTA to participate, sometimes also leading to questionnaires. And finally, I kept on nurturing past participants over Discord so they would stay and continue being available for research.

As for the research activities themselves, the main communication channel with participants was the chat, but in the Discovery Lab I had a separate room for activities where I didn’t want any social bias occurring. This way, I could talk individually with each participant, or travel with each one separately to a specific location or space, ensuring I only had one participant at a time.

Impact

• Faster feedback from players which in turn allowed faster and more actionable improvements to spaces and experiences;
• Better feedback quality due to high research contextualisation. Changes were country specific, therefore, more effective. And players were more truthful in their feedback: no desirability effects were noticed and they could act as they do in the game (with their game persona);
• More ambassadors and higher retention due to the perception of nurturing and being listened to in the Discovery Lab;
• The continuous feedback flow elevated UX Research’s value throughout the company. More stakeholders saw the need and impact of having continuous user feedback and a team ready to make changes;
• The presentation of videos of real players interacting and stating their feedback had a huge impact on senior management and C-level vision, leading to shifts in the company roadmap.