​Getting Started

For this assignment we had to change a significant aspect of the avatar creation process. To start, we liked the idea of users creating avatars for other users based on their perception of that user. People often make avatars based on what they wish they were like, or what they would like to be, rather than accurately portraying themselves. This is one of the aspects of avatar creation that we aimed to subvert.

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One member of our group pointed out how faulty personality quizzes on social media sites can be.  We decided to use a personality questionnaire for users to learn about other users, off which they would base the created avatar. We created a personality quiz for users to take, one that we felt was stronger than most of what we had seen online previously (another subversive take, not as typical in avatar creation, but in this project we also pose a critique on poorly designed personality quizzes). Instead of making your own avatar, you would see another user's responses and base your avatar on how they filled out the questionnaire. 

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Questionnaire

Here is the questionnaire. After filling it out, you can view individual responses and pick a user's series of responses to make an avatar for.  

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The questions in our personality quiz are as unbiased as possible. I came up with the questions, and in the first iteration of questions I was inadvertently hinting that one answer was better than the other (for example: The sun is out, the birds are chirping, and your friends want to stay in for a movie marathon and snacks at home. Does this sound more fun than going for a night in the woods? Starting with "the sun is out, the birds are chirping" makes it seem like the suggested answer would be to go out and camp, even if that's not what the user really wanted). For the final series of questions -- narrowed down from thirty questions to ten -- I tried to incorporate obvious personality traits in a way that would encourage users to be as honest as possible with their responses, and to not think about whether there is an answer they're "supposed" to choose.

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Accessories

Contrary to the unbiased questionnaire, the avatar accessory choices are as stereotypical as possible (soccer ball, reddit shirt, short shorts - images that have obvious characteristics associated with them). The idea is that the avatar creator is forced into certain stereotypes, but those stereotypes are to be used to reflect the creator's perception of the respective user's questionnaire responses. The user might be outdoorsy, but hate to play soccer, yet the soccer ball is the only outdoorsy accessory available. It's all about the creator's perception of the user. 

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The quiz does not force stereotypes upon the user, but when creating the avatar, stereotypical connections between answers and images are all the avatar creator really has to work with. 



 

Lack of Integration?

It is not ideal that the avatar creation swf file and questionnaire are not integrated. This is because we focused more on the concept behind it (perfecting the questions, the right accessory options, et cetera).

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Ideally, the user fills out the questionnaire, sees responses and chooses one to create an avatar for, and is brought to the avatar creation page after which they can save the avatar and send it to its respective user. Given our group members' collective time constraints, we failed to create an interface for all these things to happen. However, the concept behind our project is well represented in the non-integrated methods mentioned here (the questionnaire, above and the avatar creation swf, below).