Social VR
Executive Masterclasses
Product Design for Virtual Reality.
Between June 2020 and May 2021, at The Leadership Network, I led the design of 10 different Masterclasses on topics such as Innovation, Lean, Supply Chain and Digitalisation. These were delivered over 5 days entirely in VR using the Meta Quest for up to 30 users at a time.
RESPONSIBILITIES
-
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
-
PROJECT LEADERSHIP
-
PRODUCT DESIGN
-
UX DESIGN
-
LEARNING EXPERIENCE DESIGN
-
TRAINING THE TRAINERS
The Project In Numbers
1000+
TOTAL USERS IN YEAR1
+3.5M£
REVENUE IN YEAR1
+30
SESSIONS DELIVERED IN YEAR1
5
TEAM MEMBERS
THE FIRST OF ITS KIND
Up to that moment, The Leadership Network was organising all Masterclasses in meeting rooms around the world, however Covid-19 put a stop on 'business as usual' and there were no signs of a return to normal.
The company had to act quickly, as a backlog of 200+ VPs and directors were unable to attend the sessions they were registered to. Therefore, I was asked by the company's CEO to explore how we could re-design all Masterclasses to enable our customers to attend remotely using Virtual Reality.
There were no guidelines, no best practices and shortly after accepting the challenge, I discovered that, until then, no one had run a live training with up to 30 users together using social virtual reality.
To date, the experiences created have been enjoyed by senior professionals from 250+ companies such as the ones below.
THE CHALLENGES
1. The users were senior executives from Global Fortune 2000 companies expecting only world-class standards.
2. The original content had to be re-designed to maximise the use of the 3D space and enhance the learning experience.
3. Users who never used VR before had to be onboarded quickly ensuring they enjoyed every minute of it.
4. Trainers who never used VR before needed to be trained to seamlessly present in front of an audience in VR.
HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN
After a thorough analysis of existing multi-user VR experiences in June 2020, my findings suggested that such experiences were scarce and mostly fashion events or small scale pilots.
As there were no best practices, I let myself be guided by the only available North Star: the users. I demo-ed users using an MVP version of Gemba to learn more about their VR experience, what worked and didn't work. Up to that moment, Gemba, our VR application developed in-house, hadn't been used for any live events.
After finding what users enjoyed and didn't enjoy in VR, how they like to spend their time in this new environment and how they would like to learn, I started designing a pilot of the VR Masterclass experience based on the wants and needs of our customers.
THE MASTERCLASS EXPERIENCE
What became essential from users research was that we had to ramp up on engagement. This meant combining short lectures in the auditorium with learning by doing exercises, short fun activities and frequent breaks. The exercises were designed for the users to apply the concepts learned in small randomly allocated breakout room groups of 4-6 users.
Months before each Masterclass I started designing the experience with the trainers choreographing each session minute by minute. to make it memorable and engaging. Goal: Make it memorable!
Even from the pilot programme, user satisfaction from the VR Masterclass increased by 15% compared to the same Masterclass previously delivered in a face-to-face environment.
Click through the gallery on the right to find out about some of the key experiences and functionalities I designed enabling users to enjoy each moment of their VR experience.
MAKING VR EASILY ACCESSIBLE
A key customer challenge was that even though they were interested in the technology, none of them had a VR headset or enough experience with the technology.
Therefore, we had to get a Meta Quest VR headset for each Masterclass participant to deliver the product to them. We created a Logistics team to buy and ship headsets globally for each one of our customers.
The Meta Quest headset would arrive on everyone's porch a few days before the Masterclass began with a short set-up guide. The Friday before the Masterclass started, all participants would attend a one-to-one 30-mins onboarding with a member of our Operations team.
In my research, I identified the key challenges that people were having with VR and crafted the Onboarding Script to minimise those challenges. The Operations team was using this script choreographing every minute of the onboarding, to showcase all application features and giving them practical advice on navigating VR.
First-time user experiences are essential and here the mission was to get everyone comfortable with VR and excited about what was to come.
MANAGING END-TO-END TRANSFORMATION
The transition started with a project roadmap mapping the work required based on existing resources, in particular development time and logistics. Taking the input of the Sales team, I had to prioritise the Masterclasses which were likely to generate more revenue.
Between the first VR Masterclass pilot in October 2020 and the remaining 9 Masterclasses which also had to be transitioned to VR, there was a break of one month to enable a quicker scale-up for the remaining Masterclasses. This time was used to reflect and share the learning, streamline the processes and create complete alignment between the various teams involved (Sales, Operations, Marketing and Development). After which all other Masterclasses were transferred sequentially into VR.
Every month, I would run a team retrospective to assess what could be improve and create an action plan.
In May 2021, following the successful transition of the entire portfolio of Masterclasses, I handed over the leadership of the project to the Operations Team.