What is a VIM? A VIM, meaning energy or spirit, is a digital soul linked to your toys, bound via an RFID sticker and blockchain. In VIM World, you will be able to scan your toy, see it come alive in battles, and feed your VIMs with your friends!
Fun, right? For VIM World, I was introduced to the project a month before its intended launch date into the App Store, which meant I had two weeks to invent a design system and pass on pixel-perfect screens without undermining the existing information architecture.
Tools
Usability Testing | System Design | Interaction Design | Prototyping | Wireframing (Figma & Sketch) | Miro | Developed in Unity
The VIM Community
Every decentralized application has a supporting ecosystem and community. While that sounds abstract, and I’m probably losing you because you’d rather go play with your friends, wouldn’t it be great if you could earn money by having fun?
The VIM community is built on games and friendship that allow members to earn tokens while gaming. You can feed the tokens to level up your VIM pets. The highest of the levels earn you and your friends voting power and other perks.
Below are some graphics I made for the whitepaper and web app:
Without further ado, here is the start of the app design process. The skeleton sitemap:
If you have tapped into the crypto world before, chances are that wallet, transfers, and tokens will be familiar to you. But what does “link” mean?
As mentioned before, you can link a physical toy to your NFT (Non-Fungible Token) VIM.
The branches were broken down into individual flows and screens. We’ll use transfer as an example.
Before handing the design off to Unity engineers, I tested a prototype with 8 users. It was so much fun to see faces light up from getting to interact with both a physical toy and their phones!
To link, you can either enter the toy ID manually or scan for the toy. I modified the 2B toy with a piece of tape with numbers on the bottom for the toy ID. All the test participants understood how they could link the toy and put her right on top of the magic circle.
*2B figurine from Nier Automata,
The test results for the first draft weren't fantastic, though.
Some issues were:
1. There wasn’t nearly enough hand-holding or ways to find out why to interact with the VIMs.
2. Players were confused why they would want to partake in the ecosystem.
3. Players, even those who would buy into in-game purchases, were hesitant to invest in the VIMs because there were many details that were unclear. What were the games? How could they earn more VIM treats? What abilities would they learn at higher tiers?
4. Players wanted more ways to interact with VIMs in a more friendly environment.
FUTURE
Tons of opportunities still remain for this world and NFTs.
User research would be my top priority to reach our audience.
The content and world building can take a large step forward as well if we want to give gamers the ultimate mixed reality experience of engaging with physical toys and digital renderings of the characters' stories.