Context
BehaVR was building an XR program to treat social anxiety, and after a successful MVP playtest, needed a way to unify its disparate mechanics into a cohesive long-term user experience.
Process
I co-led a two-day onsite workshop addressing three themes: engagement and habit formation, user progression, and narrative. To align participants across departments and with the client, we opened with a user empathy exercise — walking the group through interview excerpts with social anxiety sufferers and synthesizing them into structured need statements. This established a shared language for the targeted ideation that followed.
Each theme was addressed with activities tailored to the ideas we needed to generate: How Might We questions to frame new mechanics, brain writing to build on them collaboratively, a 10+10 sketch exercise to explore progression systems, and a mind-mapping session to develop a narrative framework tying everything together.
Outcome
I distilled the workshop’s outputs into six actionable workstreams — tactile VR progression, symbolic progression, daily check-ins, reminders and CTAs, hints and feedback, and new game mechanics — each scoped to produce testable prototypes. The result became the scaffolding for six months of design sprints, with clear goals that made it significantly easier to communicate intent to the client and executive team.
