Avatars editor

Parametric editing for a next-gen avatar style — face, body, color systems — across mobile and VR. Validated across five rounds of UXR.

Product Design Lead
2022–2024
Mobile + VR
UX Architecture + Interaction
Art, 3D, Prototyping, UXR, Eng, CD

Context

1B+ avatars created. A new avatar style was about to launch — but the existing editor only let users pick from presets. To match the visual jump on the new style, the editor had to grow up too: from preset-picking to real parametric control.

Challenge

My role

Led the design of the parametric editor for the new avatar style. The UX that lets users shape faces and bodies with precision — not pick from a menu.

Three Avatars editor mockups on a dark navy-to-peach gradient — hairstyle picker, parametric eye picker with Size, Angle and Distance sliders, and lip-color palette across Matte / Satin / Gloss finishes — direction-setting concept for the parametric editing system
North star vision mocks

Two surfaces, one identity

This was never only a mobile feature. The same identity system had to hold on a phone and inside VR — the editor as a panel floating at arm’s length, driven by gaze and controller instead of a thumb. A control that reads as a tidy grid at six inches becomes a reach target in a room, so each pattern had to be designed once and survive both.

The editor running in VR — a panel floating in a living room, with the category rail down the left (Discover, Clothing, Accessories, Hair, Makeup, Face, Body, Closet), a hairstyle grid and Style/Colour toggle in the middle, and the avatar previewed at right
The same editor in VR — a panel at arm’s length, same taxonomy, different reach.

Making a very large system feel small

Hair, face, torso, arms, legs, feet — each with its own shapes, colours, textures and accessories, and each of those with states, modifiers and edge cases. Drawn out in full, the system runs to hundreds of screens. Depth was never the hard part. The hard part is that depth is overwhelming the moment you show all of it at once, and this editor had to stay something people would play with.

A system this size gets designed at two altitudes at once. I mapped the whole customization surface — what belongs to hair against face against torso, which attributes want a grid, which a slider, which a colour bar — then took that structure down into screens, where the edge cases push back and send you up to revise it again. Getting the taxonomy right is what lets the interface stay quiet: a few clear choices at a time, everything else one level down until it’s asked for.

The customization taxonomy — Hair, Face, Torso, Arms, Legs and Feet as columns, each attribute paired with the control it should use (grid, slider, colour bar), with proposed additions and open questions marked inline
Taxonomy exploration — what belongs where, and which control each attribute wants.
The working board — avatar-generation and onboarding flows on the left, and to the right the editor's states laid out category by category across Accessories, Hair, Makeup and Face, each screen carrying its own status and review notes
The system at full size — every state, every category, tracked screen by screen.

Key decisions (validated through UXR)

Impact

Shipped the next-gen avatar style launch across mobile and VR with full parametric editing.

15%

The avatar-creation completion baseline — cleared after launch.

Expanded representation — inclusive body, face, and complexion ranges.

Became the canvas for the next wave of AI editing — Style with AI restyles against this parametric system.

As featured in

Interaction Design UX Architecture Inclusive Design Research Partnership 3D/Spatial UI Progressive Disclosure Color Systems