IMVU'S 'WITHME' INITIATIVE

Strategy    Product Management    UX/UI

MAY 2013 - MAY 2014

WITHME GOALS

The WithMe effort was a series of experiments bent on hardening IMVU's NorthStar 3D Engine and Server Side Rendering technologies. A side benefit to these experiments was the possibility of growing new businesses while we were at it. For both the Messenger and Games efforts, I was the Product Manager in charge of strategy, scheduling, day to day management, delivery, testing, and reporting results. 

GAMES

Disclaimer: I can not show the games we shipped.

We had always wanted to push the boundaries of what you could DO with your avatar. Dress up, puppeteer, interact: check! But what about rules & roles, bragging rights & leaderboards? What about games?! With N* and SSR available to us, we could test both high involvement & passive involvement experiences to see what would work best from an avatar-based communication perspective.

I was brought in to get the original team back on track: building a web portal and six, end to end games from scratch in eight weeks. We used the WithMe brand name to launch a games portal that tested several avatar-centric games. We used two week dev cycles, treated everyone as a designer and kicked ass. I've had several former team members tell me this effort was the best thing they had ever been a part of.

We were able to run enough traffic through this games portal (+/- 30k people) to find & squash bugs and generally harden N*.

MESSENGER

With IMVU, we proved that there was a viable business in selling 3D avatars. How would a 2D-only avatar product fare? What if it were asynchronous? We focused our efforts on a mobile messenger that would take expressive avatars to the next level. We leveraged IMVU's highly customizable avatar pipeline and pushed the bounds of its SSR image generation tools to highlight real connection with chatting avatars. Other avatar products existed at the time so it was important that ours be differentiated somehow. SSR gave us the power to play with both cinematography and interaction. We could have our avatars TOUCH: kiss, hug, console, fight, everything.

We ran even more traffic through WithMe Messenger (+/- 100k people) with each person representing multiple instances of N* running on the server. This approach worked! We found and fixed loads of scalability & rendering bugs and were ready to leverage both N* and SSR in the Core IMVU product.

Here is a taste of the kinds of things we showed off with this messenger:

Emotional extent examples: Anger & Sorrow

App Walk Through

SUCCESS!

Sticking with the goal of porting IMVU across platforms took years, multiple projects and a lot of hard work. However, the IMVU business is now thriving on Mobile. It's tripled it's active user base and is primarily (about 85%) Mobile.