Designing the B2B Metaverse

I joined the team shortly after their initial launch. They were still trying to figure out product-market fit — how people were actually using the platform and how to get new users properly onboarded.

To learn more, I conducted 12 interviews with existing users and ran virtual field studies with 6 groups of users entering the world for the first time.

The UI at the time had many issues — people struggled to connect to the audio channel, mute themselves, or navigate the virtual environment.

We wanted an interface that felt closer to familiar meeting tools like Google Hangouts and Zoom. Borrowing those patterns would lower the barrier of entry and make the transition into 3D environments feel natural.

To land on the new UI I organised a three-day design sprint that included development and the executive team. The goal was to understand what our users actually wanted, and to surface the structural issues that got in their way.

We came out of the sprint with two directions worth validating.

Many users were not familiar with video-game controls, so we ran several initiatives to close that gap. The initial onboarding took place in a virtual lobby where users could try the controls on their own while the main world loaded — with a 3D interactive avatar to practice on.

In parallel we introduced S.A.R.A (Sentient Autonomous Robot Aid) — a helpful bot users could invoke by speech or text at any time. S.A.R.A pulled from the knowledge base and answered in a synthesised AI voice.

Most clients wanted a world they could truly call their own — custom avatar skins, brand colours, and assets running across the interface and the 3D environments.

We also split-tested variations of the login screen itself, exploring which layouts and login options each client preferred.

Adding video conferencing was a major milestone. We wanted it to feel three-dimensional: participants appear based on their rotation and distance from the user’s avatar.

As you turn the camera and move around, the video tiles rotate with you — like a compass — always keeping the people facing you in view.

Creating worlds used to take hours — each one had to be assembled by hand by one of our admins. We wanted to speed that up dramatically.

The result was a modular worlds system with interchangeable facilities and rooms, plus an admin panel where clients can configure their brand, pick facilities on a map, and invite users in a few clicks.