Parallel.Town
October, 2023 - June, 2024
Role
Founding Product Designer
Responsibility
0-1 iOS App, Mobile and Desktop Website Product & Marketing Design
Result
Successfully generated 10+k users after product launched 2 months and #k+ daily sign up.
Intro and Discover - Parallel.Town
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What is Parallel.Town?
When we look back the last 10 years, the way we chat and companion with each other has evolved a lot. And Powered by artificial intelligence, Parallel.Town is a platform that let users create lifelike digital characters, tell stories through their appearances with open-ended conversations, interact with digital companions. and building associated worlds. Meanwhile, you can craft new characters, stories, even a world and universe with a single-line prompt, personalized voices, and selected personas.
After witnessing how AI chatbots have rapidly emerged on mainstream social media platforms and evolved from behind-the-scenes supporters to "companions" assisting on the front-end to form connections with humans, we also observed several interesting traits from them.
Findings
Metrics
No.1
AI Companionship is not limited to find a virtual partners, but also chat with trending topics.
No.2
People like having group chat which gives them with a sense of belonging.
Number of Characters and Worlds Inventory, Daily & Weekly Active User, Number of Message/Minute, New Sign-up rate, NPS
Imagining that Hermione Granger walking in the forbidden forest and meeting with Harry Potter and Professor Snape, who confront their shared past and uncover truths about their intertwined destinies. As a fan of the Harry Potter series, you might want to become a lifelike Hermione to join their conversation, or be an outsider of three of them to see how this conversation develops.
So, what if we can support people to find a lifelike ai chatbot or a ai chatbot group, chat with those single or a group of ai characters they like in a room to develop this open-ended conversation together?
Then, the users’ journey might be a user visit Parallel.Town to browse an ai character on homepage to chat. If they cannot find one, they might left or create a new ai character to start a chat … Therefore, offering a simple character or group chat creation feature is critical.
The magic AI chat creation tool
Since we are a world-chat-driven AI chatbot platform, the inventory of worlds is critical to user retention. Thus, how might we enable users to create worlds with minimum efforts and increase our world inventory in a short time? Empowered by AI, this magic creation tool allows users to generate worlds chats and characters with just a single prompt or an image. It not only significantly reduces the effort required for manual customization but also enables users to create a world chat without designing a character at the beginning.
Solution Overview
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The magic Auto-creation flow can quickly create things in 3 seconds.
To make the world and character creation flow extremely simple, we minimized creation steps, which only requires user to write a prompt or input minimum data like bot’s name, profile image, and add characters to quickly start a conversation. I designed an advanced setting which allows user to add more details about the world or characters, and add example conversations in the preview setting to co-develop the original characters’ storytelling better.
Starting from a quick creation, and editing details in an advanced setting to train conversation starters.
User can edit sample conversation in preview to setup the script as close as they imagined.
In our ongoing effort to enhance user engagement within the open-ended world chat, we introduced the persona feature two months post-launch. Now, upon completing world creation, users have the option to select a persona before entering a multi-character world chat. Whether choosing to embody a predefined character from the community, or creating a unique persona, users can explore new identities within fictional narratives, co-developing new adventures with creativity and enjoyment.
By clicking the 🧹 besom icon, users can initiate a new thread, optionally adopting a persona to catalyze dynamic group discussions on topics ranging from travel and gaming to coding tutorials. To further empower customization, we've integrated Markdown support, ensuring users can finely tailor their world chat introduction through our custom creation flow.
You can experience a new character persona in the same chatroom after creating a new thread
Surface the core product values on the landing page to help users comprehend our product better and improve sign ups rates
Aimed to reduce the promise of offering a 24/7 lifelike AI character to manage users' expectations in the previous page. We've experienced a few shutdowns in the past six months, and when users see the loading state, they might think, "Ah, those AI characters are sleeping or on airplane mode”.
regards the one-click email signup, we also a/b/c/d tested a few signup experiences to improve users’ comprehension of the ‘world chat’ concept in our platform before finalizing with this version.
User can upload sound file or record their voice to customize the character’s voice
Customizing persona to co-develop the open-ending conversation
Introduce the voice cloning feature
To enhance the lifelike communication of AI characters, akin to human interaction, we launched a voice cloning (beta) feature in July 2024. Character creators can now upload preferred voices for specific characters. Users can record their responses and send them as voice messages to characters.
A seamless real-time communication
Listening to a message with a proper tone is more authentic than reading text, allowing for a deeper connection. Our one-click voice reply feature makes it intuitive for mobile users to respond, mimicking the feel of a natural conversation. At Parallel Town, we're revolutionizing content creation and consumption by offering a holistic flow that incorporates reading, typing, listening, and speaking. This multifaceted approach caters to diverse user needs, instantly elevating their content consumption experience.
Snippet of design system
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(More detail upon request)
Appendix: Marketing Materials
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As the founding designer on this product team, I’ve taken on a dual role encompassing both product design and the creation of marketing materials to effectively promote our product and new feature releases. Except for product design assets, I’ve produced a range of marketing assets during my tenure. It includes Logo, Favicon, Landing Page, App Store posters for the early iOS version, TikTok videos, and product feature announcement videos, etc. Below is a snippet of my marketing design contributions, more examples are available upon request.
Marketing Video
iOS Appstore
Metrics, Outcomes and Next Step
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From Failure to Success: Lessons Learned
Our journey began with an iOS app that struggled in its early stages. Because the approval time of iOS apps are very long, which cannot aligned with our speed. However, we bounced back with the official launch of our website in March 2024, and has achieved 30k+ sign-ups and 40% retention rate within the first 7 days. This success was remarkable for a small team of 4 and $0 marketing budget. Meanwhile, this consumer product has iterated as a enterprise product with a top5 gaming company in APAC>
Key Takeaways:
Storytelling through chatbots: Designing our product taught us to extract valuable user data, enabling engaging storytelling scripts for our chatbot.
Product-led growth: Focus on enhancing the core product value for users, and popularity will follow naturally.
Embracing imperfections: As a founding designer in an early-stage startup, my responsibilities not only requires to provide product design prototype, but more about how to design things from a product strategy, a journey experience to fulfill the goal than a single feature and create a new feature match with whole product experience. Meanwhile, it's important to be friends with developers and consumers, delivering high-quality work while accepting that things won't always be perfect.
Next Steps:
Baget and Leaderboard: people are naturally competitive and willing to show something they did well. Giving creators a special badge and offering a leaderboard for creators might help users better show those high-quality creations they’ve done, and improve our inventory of worlds and characters.
Revenue Stream: Introducing a paywall to offer enhanced experiences for paid users and ensure self-sustainability, as AI technology can be costly and latency-prone.
NSFW Prevention: Collaborating with engineers to minimize NSFW content and reduce paid user loss.