AR Expressive Characters was an initiative that I led at Facebook.  The vision was to offer users a variety of memorable characters they could transform into and also use to express themselves with.  The north star's goal was to make these character experiences fully customizable and unique so users could apply them as their personalized Avatars on video calls.  The effort served as a major cross-functional workstream for developing facial tracking and other advanced persistent features on Facebook's Spark AR platform.  

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Two of the initiative's biggest challenges were to continually create new and compelling characters, as well as make the experience engaging with the limited tech specs (allowing it to run on low-end devices). That led to finding creative solutions in the base designs as well as find ways to procedurally build animations and materials.  

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There was heavy focus on retention and increasing user engagement.  In order to do that, it was extremely important that each of the experiences felt unique and different from the one that proceeded it.  We built-in narratives and interactions that helped lead users into wanting many more of these experiences (as evident in user research and metrics).  

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User research played a major role in the development cycle of the AR Expressive Characters.  Through user testing and feedback, we were able to understand what users wanted and needed out of these experiences.  We were able to identify what designs and styles users responded to the most, as well as the pain points that would help us improve with our iterations.  Iterations included various narratives, visual styles, UX, and interactivity.   

 

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