Incentivized In-game User Surveys for World/Avatar/Tool/Udon Creation Feedback
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Surveys are incredibly useful for gathering information on user experiences. There have been some discussions about ways to let users give feedback to world creators, but what if VRChat provided global surveys querying feedback on various user preferences when it comes to worlds, avatars, controls, and more instead? I'm sure this type of information would be useful to VRChat but it would also be incredibly useful for creators, students, and researchers if everyone were granted access to view the results.
VRChat relies on user created content, so giving world and avatar creators ways to view survey results based on feedback beyond their immediate communities will help us tailor our content directly to the average player's preferences. This could also help create some uniformity across world experiences, and help developers create more relevant tools to assist creators.
Surveys could include hardware and controller questions to help creators understand specific needs and preferences based on those factors. One survey could query questions about per-world created UI design, how they prefer to open in-world menus, how much they like or dislike seeing floating menus and dialogue in the world, etc. Another survey could feature preferences when it comes to post-processing, with questions confirming how familiar they are with the various features of it, what effects they like, what effects they don't like, how strong things like bloom or noise can be before becoming detrimental to the world... Other surveys could query avatar preferences such as clothing, audio link, toys/gimmicks, etc...
Perhaps eventually users could submit their own surveys they'd like to have queried based on a set of guidelines that one of the VRChat teams could review, requiring x-amount of surveys completed by the user first to ensure to an extent that the questions haven't already been covered by a different survey.
Incentives could possibly include limited time access to VRC+ exclusive features, like x+ hours/uses of stickers or custom emojis, or a badge that evolves like the VRC+ Gifts depending on how many surveys a user has completed.
To keep information and results relevant, perhaps answers could expire after x-amount of months, allowing users to re-answer the surveys to account for potential hardware changes or new features and to continue increasing their badge count over time without needing more and more surveys.
If other methods of giving users ways to provide feedback directly to creators is implemented in the future - having a broad range of surveys available to cross-reference would help creators quantify positive or negative feedback before deciding whether or not to cater to it, as well as perhaps also supplement and enhance the type of feedback users give.
Thoughts?
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GodAva ~
I think a major component missing from VRChat has been user feedback on content. Providing more structured ways for users to offer input could significantly increase quality across the board. This is a wonderful idea. In any development environment user feedback and experience has always been the primary source to encourage improvement outside the scope of the authors understanding or perspective.
In addition to surveys, it might also be beneficial to allow users to submit performance reports directly to world creators. These reports could take a diagnostic snapshot of their game instance, logs, applications, and hardware, giving creators actionable data to optimize their worlds for different setups and troubleshoot issues more effectively. Users could also have the option to submit bug reports to world or avatar creators through in-game systems.
That said, offering this ability to every user may not yield the most reliable results, as not all users may provide thoughtful or useful feedback in every context. It might be worth considering a simple qualification process. Ideally, one that’s fairly accessible and unrestricted, that could be put to use in helping to filter such feedback. So that creators could easily swap between
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feedback and responses from these users. This could help keep responses to a higher quality incentivizing users based on being "part of something" while at the same time allowing the feedback to be manageable for creators.Either way, I think a platform built on user content and contribution should absolutely provide creators with opportunities to receive feedback beyond algorithmic popularity or external efforts.