Designing a Welcoming Environment in VRChat for New Users

Problem: New users to VRChat, an immersive VR social platform, felt overwhelmed and didn’t understand how to navigate through the platform, including how to use safety features to avoid bullying and harassment.

Solution: A VRChat tutorial, including a walk-through of its safety tools. Two new features were also added. One was a VR buddy system, which pairs new users with another user so they can explore the platform together, and the other was a shared interest feature which highlights when you’re near a player that shares a common interest. See our final prototype here.

This project was part of a 10-week course entitled User-Centered Design in the University of Washington’s Master of Science in Human-Centered Design and Engineering. The prompt for this project was “do no harm,” with the restriction of not designing a website or app. My team initially decided to focus on harassment in VR environments after reading an article about sexual harassment in Horizon Worlds.

The project aimed to explore some of the safety concerns that are present in virtual spaces and provide a solution that offers a richer experience for all groups of people, regardless of their gender, identity, or race. We chose to focus on VRChat, as it was one of the most popular VR social platforms and also had a lot of complaints about harassment.

The initial design question was: How do we design a safe environment and harassment-free experience for people in VR spaces?

Presenting the final design solution to stakeholders with my VRChat team.

User Research

Below are various user research methods I helped contribute for this project.

Secondary research

Secondary research included:

• Reading articles and papers on topics such as harassment in VR, building online communities, ethical considerations of VR, and embodiment.

• Browsing various Reddit threads on the VRChat subreddit where players discussed issues such as harassment, interactions, motivations for play, and more.

Rapid Ethnography

Rapid ethnography gave us a clearer understanding of the spaces and people that users are interacting with, and find discrepancies between what they had or had not pointed out initially. I used an Oculus VR headset and tried several social VR platforms, ultimately focusing on the platform VRChat as it is highly customizable and unmoderated. I joined the platform to observe users, understand their behavior, and see what the environments and social norms were like.

Survey

My team created a survey in Qualtrics, and recruited participants from two discord channels and five subreddits, from which we got 91 responses. The VRChat subreddit has over 140,000 members and is quite active, representing a good portion of our target users. The team decided a survey would be one of the best methods that could be used to reach users across the country with varying experiences with VR, and this method gave a way to gather information quickly with no extra cost.

Research Findings & Personas

After the research phase was complete, the main takeaways were:

• New users were overwhelmed by the complicated UI, navigation, and extensive safety features, and are not onboarded properly. VRChat has no onboarding process except to show users how to walk or teleport, and many users learned how to block or mute only through the need to perform the actions repeatedly.

• "It's like going to a bar with a daycare" - Long-term and expert users see children as the main source of harassment problems in VR. However, they did cite many other types of harassment, including verbal (personal insults, slurs, sexualized language, etc), physical (blocking the way, groping, etc), and environmental (being loud, drawing sexual imagery, etc).

• "Yeah I really hate the new UI that came out 3 months ago there's like, 13 tabs. It's too much." - The customizable and free nature of VRChat is its strength, but also its weakness. Because it is highly customizable, the UI is overly complicated. And the freedom some features afford to its users also lead to increased harassment (such as custom avatars that can crash computers, the ability to create NSFW worlds or avatars, etc).

• VRChat users primarily use VRChat to meet new people or hang out with friends they already know, with secondary motivations being entertainment, exploration of worlds, and self-expression.

From our user research data, we created personas together of our primary users, secondary users, and we also created an anti-persona. Below is our main persona (Newbie Mushroom), along with our two other personas:

New Design Question

After discussing the main findings and problems that presented themselves during the research phase, the team decided to focus on new users through the persona Newbie Mushroom. Though expert users felt comfortable using the block, mute, and other safety features, new users were easily overwhelmed and did not quickly learn how to protect themselves from harassment. Expert users were also likely to have used other VR platforms or have previous gaming experience, causing them to adjust to the controls more quickly and be more accustomed to harassment behaviors.

This led to the new design question: “How can we equip new users with the skills to navigate VRChat and make new connections within 1 week (or ~4 hours of use) of joining the platform?”

Along with the design question, the team decided on the following design goals:

• Make meeting new people with shared interests easier.

• Simplify onboarding for new users.

• Help new users navigate the VRChat spaces.

• Inform new users of the VRChat rules, culture, and social norms.

• Provide users the skills to deal with unwanted interruptions.
  

I sketched out ideas for design solutions with my group. The three main themes from these sketches were:

• An onboarding experience for new users that provides a tutorial for controls, rules and safety, exploring worlds, and finding avatars. This tutorial also teaches users how to add friends, mute, and block other players. Currently, VRChat doesn’t have an onboarding tutorial.

• A “shared interests” feature so that users may meet other people with similar interests. When users approach each other, an icon will appear over their head if they have shared interests, which will help foster quicker connections. It will also show users worlds related to their interests so they can find like-minded people, and use this information to pair them with a VR buddy that has similar hobbies (see below for more on VR buddies).

• A VR “buddy” system, where new users can be paired with new or experienced users so they are not alone when entering VRChat for the first time. Users will be matched with buddies with similar interests. If a user doesn’t feel like their buddy is a fit, they can request a new buddy or opt out of having a buddy.

Below are some of the original sketch ideas followed by the refined sketches that represent the fully fleshed-out design solution ideas.

User Flows, Scenarios & Testing

Created from our design ideas and refined sketches, I collaborated with my group to create scenarios and user flows that were used as the basis for our first prototype, which were created in Figma. The new user onboarding experience was prioritized since teaching users how to keep themselves safe was the most important aspect, followed by the "shared interests" feature, and then the VR "buddy" system. Everyone in the group participated in prototyping, and split up the work so each person had something to prototype. Below are examples of the user flows:

The group conducted four usability testing sessions with a mid-fidelity prototype of the onboarding solution. I acted as the facilitator for one of these sessions and the notetaker for a different session. The prototype was loaded onto a virtual desktop so that users could test the prototype by using a VR headset and controls. After that, the participant went into VRChat and was given tasks to complete to see if the tutorial had properly taught them how to navigate different worlds, mute/block/report users, and make friends.

The usability tests were split up into two iterations: the first was a low-fidelity prototype tested on two users. After some rapid iterations were made, the prototype was upgraded to a medium-fidelity prototype and was tested on two other users. Each member was responsible for a portion of the prototyping. See our lo-fidelity prototype below.

First Round of Testing & Changes

Finding: Felt too long with too much information (2/2 participants)
‍Recommendation: Shorten tutorial, leaving only the most crucial information.

• Finding: Felt learning was repetitive, especially add friend/block/mute section (1/2 participants)
  ‍Recommendation: Take out add friend/block/mute demonstrations so the user doesn’t go through this twice.

• Finding: Didn’t know why you’d want to mute other players (1/2 participants) 
  ‍Recommendation: Reorder prototype and create a story element in the tutorial so users understand harassment might happen VRChat.

• Finding: Multiple items were highlighted on certain pages, didn’t know where to click to get to the next screen (1/2 participants)
  Recommendation: Remove extra highlighted items and specified in the text where to click.

• Finding: Thought self mute button was muting the other player (1/2 participants)
  ‍Recommendation: Explain specifically where the self mute button is and how to tell whether you are muted or not.

• Finding: Didn’t know if the robot was talking or the other user (1/2 participants) 
  ‍Recommendation: Add a thought bubble with text to show the Robot is the one speaking. Add an avatar of a banana as the other user you add as a friend/block/mute and specify this in the tutorial.

Second Round of Testing & Changes

Finding: Not seeing or knowing they should be clicking “next” in the tutorial, or don’t see VR assistant entirely (2/2 participants)
‍Recommendation: Make the next button larger. Add narration to VR assistant so that users do not skip or miss. 

• Finding: Hovering over mouse buttons in tutorial (2/2 participants)
  ‍Recommendation: Because screenshots were used for the mid-fidelity prototype, some mouse pointers were not in the correct place. Remove mouse pointers entirely.

• Finding: Forgot about Launch Pad (1/2 participants)
  ‍Recommendation: Upon entry to game, add quick pop-up to remind users of most important controls and how to find the Launch Pad again. 

• Finding: Confused by text below main menu (1/2 participants)
  ‍Recommendation: When walking through Launch Pad UI, tell users if they are confused about an icon they can check the text below to see what it does.

• Finding: Held down buttons rather than clicking (1/2 participants)
  ‍Recommendation: Make language more clear that users need to press buttons quickly, as a long hold will bring up other menu options. 

With the feedback from the four user testing sessions and a cross-class critique, the group iterated one more time, finalizing the information architecture and making a high-fidelity prototype. Changes to the final prototype included adding consistent language, a progress bar, a fleshed out shared interests feature, arrows for where to click when there are no "next" buttons, and an overview of the controllers before entering VRChat.

Below is a sample of our final prototype based on the usability test updates.

Design Solution

You can see our full high fidelity prototype here, which was completed in Figma and a video demo of our project for more details. See more details of our final design solution below, along with our original sketches, refined sketches and final design.

The design solution is an onboarding tutorial for new users using VRChat. This tutorial covers 6 sections: how to use the controllers, how to use the launch pad, where to find avatars, how to update your profile, how to explore worlds, and interactions such as adding friends and blocking other players. This tutorial is designed to give new users a safe space to practice interactions such as muting and blocking, without the stress of needing to escape a real harassment situation. This tutorial was built to demonstrate the user interface of VRChat in its current state.

The second feature of the design solution is the shared interests feature. This is a section of the user's profile that allows them to add their interests. In addition, when a player is in proximity to other users that share similar interests, an icon appears near their usernames to let users know they have something in common. Users are also shown worlds they might be interested in exploring based on their interests and are matched with VR Buddies that have similar interests. Ultimately, this feature allows users to meet people they have things in common with more quickly and hopefully make friends, which is the main reason users join VRChat.

The third feature of the design solution is the VR Buddy System. Many users learned how to use the block and mute features by asking other users what to do, and experienced users also reported intervening in harassment situations by teaching new users how to use these features. The VR Buddy System pairs new users with another user so they can explore VRChat together from the start. If a user isn’t happy with their buddy, they can switch buddies or opt out of the buddy system completely.

Reflections

Limitations: This project had several limitations. First, we had to work within the current UI of VRChat which is very complicated and less than ideal. We were also very constricted on time, which limited many aspects of the project we would have liked to expand on, such as recruiting more diverse participants, conducting more user testing, polishing our designs, and potentially reworking the UI entirely. We were also limited to what software we could use and the experience we had as a team with the software we had available to us.

Lessons Learned: This project was a great learning experience for me in having more empathy for users, particularly a user group I may not completely understand. When I first began this project I believe I had some preconceived notions of what the users of VRChat were like. However, after using VRChat myself and hearing from users, I gained a new understanding of what motivated people to use VRChat, and realized that in the future I would need to be even more careful of confronting any ideas I had about users before starting the research process.

What I Would Do Differently: If I could do this project again I would spend more time trying to recruit a more diverse group of participants, in ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. I would also focus more on our personas throughout the design process in order to inform our design decisions and save the time we spent reworking our first prototype.

NEXT: Redesigning the Seattle Seaplanes Website