Design flaw – unrealistic avatars

by justingibbs on March 31, 2009

Although Google Lively has been gone for 3 months we can still use them as a design example. One mistake they made was all those creative and cute avatars. In addition to a stylish guy, you could be a big headed cat or pig. And why not, it’s a virtual world you can be anything. It gives users another way to express themselves. All sounds good right, but it turns out to be a bad design choice in general. Users like realistic looking avatars. More than that, some get offended when you masquerade as another gender. Why the offense? I have a few ideas.

  1. For all the hype about being anything you want in virtual worlds, it seems the majority of users see them as an extension to the real world.
  2. In the ends virtual worlds 1.0 are little more than 3D chat and the reason people chat is to meet other people. They don’t want to meet characters you’ve created, no matter how inventive.

Peter Edward, director of the PlayStation Home Platform Group, exalts the value of realistic avatars.

Peter Edward: One of the advantages is the realistic avatar. People can relate to it straight away. It gives you the opportunity to either create something that looks like you, or it looks like your alter ego or reflects your mood. It makes it more welcoming to people who may not want to get into the whole orcs and mages thing.

Giving users uniform avatars to start with also highlights any customizations they make and most likely helps community building as well. So if it’s just the realism people want, easy connection, or uniform palate – in general virtual world builders should go with realistic looking avatars. That is unless your world is contextually heave like Club Penguin.

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Tagged as: design flaw, Google Lively

  • Ultimately this is my informed opinion. Informed by my experience working in the virtual worlds industry and speaking with users. True some like more stylistic or creative avatars but I would caution you - I never found this to be that large of a group. I would use it as a rule of thumb - users prefer realistic avatars. The rule isn't suitable for every situation, one in particular would be context heavy virtual worlds. In general though it works and you should be cautious when you break it.

    The uncanny valley is certainly an issue, but like the general trend in video games - the more realistic the better.

    I can't really speak to the variations by country, however I would think the affection for realism would be pretty universal. I'll have to investigate further.
  • Mark
    > Users like realistic looking avatars.

    That's a hunch right, not a fact? Certainly some users like "realistic" avatars but not all. Also, the distribution of preferences varies by country, age, etc. There is also the problem that what we call "realistic" avatars look very ugly to many people, look uncanny to others, etc. due to technical and artistic problems.
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