How I led the end-to-end design strategy across all discovery touchpoints — defining the journey, identifying opportunities, and pitching a cohesive strategy.
This is what people saw when putting on a VR headset.
People had a hard time grasping the difference between the horizon feed panel app in front of them and the store app.
Landing in a view where most of the recommendations are content upsells was unwelcome to most people because they already have an intent in mind when putting on their device. Witnessed by most people closing this app immediately upon loading.
The initial landing experience feels cluttered and overwhelming, and also unexpectedly flat and contained for a VR device.
This is the new version of what people see when they put on the headset.
Without a map to guide what's possible in VR, people were having a harder time figuring out what to use their device for.
Due to the difficulty in finding new use cases, we saw significant declines in time spent and monetization metrics with this redesign.
Our goal is to move away from the perception that VR is just a gaming console and towards a premium first class OS to rival other products you use every day.
While executing the new device vision, we still need to ensure it's a great experience for gaming, and give people channels to discover the use cases on our platform.
Ensure that people are still able to find experiences they want to engage with, without compromising the long-term vision of a user centered OS.
Metric regressions with the redesigned vision required urgency to identify a long-term viable solution. I was asked to come up with a proposal to present to leadership in less than 2 weeks.
I was the IC design leader on this ambiguous problem. I started by planning my approach, which included a kickoff with all relevant stakeholders and XFN experts, a design sprint, and facilitating XFN alignment and materials for review.
I started by planning, organizing, and leading a design sprint to generate a divergent set of discovery concepts.
This sprint included 16+ XFN stakeholders and consisted of a kickoff day where I invited guest speakers from DS, UXR, and several relevant product teams to ground the team of 5 contributing designers in the problem space with context.
Instead of investing in just one moment,
meet people where they are across their entire journey.
No discovery is integrated into the landing experience without explicitly opening a panel app.
Maintain the simple landing experience focused on your stuff — integrating discovery on swipe.
Most people go off-platform to discover because they are looking for gameplay videos + trusted reviews not found here today.
Introduce video-first browsing with editorial storytelling, and bring UGC on-platform.
Create seamless bridges between off-platform content and on-platform detail pages.
Stale null state recommendations, and poor medium intent recommendation quality.
Improve freshness of null state recommendations, and supercharge search result quality with AI.
No discovery is integrated into the landing experience without explicitly opening a panel app.
Maintain the simple landing experience focused on your stuff — integrating discovery on swipe.
Integrate timely discovery at the moment of experience exit, when the user is contemplating what to do next.
Add a share loop after finishing VR sessions.
After presenting to design and XFN leaders, this became the strategic plan of record and was used as a reference for the creation of multiple team roadmaps: Global Search, Mobile, and Store.
Some pieces did not have direct team owners and required further leadership review to fund. This process was underway at the end of my time at Meta.
If I could do this again, I would have focused the leadership presentation less on the controversial headset don moment and more on funding the non-controversial pieces in order to accelerate those wins and de-pressurize.
Additionally, I would pull my PM counterparts closer to this work to parallel track, aligning resourcing, and take some of that load off my plate.
