MSG camera shy social

MSG is an avatar-driven social platform for camera-shy gamers and introverts who want to share expressive reactions without the anxiety of being on camera.

I led product design as part of the founding team—2-month sprint with 1 front-end engineer and 2 voxel artists. Owned research, UX/UI, visual design, prototyping, and roadmap.

Traditional streaming platforms favor on-camera personalities, excluding millions of privacy-conscious gamers who want to build presence and express themselves without showing their face.

• No platform offered avatar-first social expression for gaming communities

• Camera-shy users had no frictionless way to react and engage

• Existing tools (Discord, Twitch) center on voice/video, not visual identity

Built a voxel-avatar emote system with location-based threaded chat. Users create custom avatars as their identity, send expressive reactions, and engage in geo-located conversations—all without a camera.

Validated through a 120-member Discord community, Crazy-8 workshops, Maze usability tests (92% task success on avatar creation), and iterative prototyping. Dropped live AR masks in favor of lightweight voxel models to manage dev cost.

After rounds of wireframes, usability testing, and community feedback, the design converged on a voxel-avatar messaging experience that felt playful and low-pressure.

• 82% prototype engagement rate (50 testers completing core interactions)

• 47% waitlist conversion—3,200 sign-ups in 30 days

• 4.4/5 post-test adoption likelihood score

Community co-creation boosted engagement. Users said it felt like “Fortnite emotes for chat—instant fun without the anxiety.”