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.

• 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.”