Oculus VR: Content Discovery Platform
Since 2019, I’ve led the Product Design team at Meta’s Reality Labs - Los Angeles. I’ve overseen design across many products all centred around the content platform we have created to drive the discovery and acquisition of VR apps, as well as carving out new use cases for VR.
My Role
Building the machine that builds the machine
When I began in this position, the team in Product Design function LA was a collection of fairly disparate teams that were operating independently. My first task was to define a clear charter for these teams that centered around helping users discover, acquire and engage with VR content - Resulting in the formation of the Discovery & Distribution org. Over the first 6 months, I defined an org structure, operating model and team culture that optimized for product quality and impact, then began scaling the team from 4 people, up to 20 over 3 years.
The Challenge
57% of new users to VR will churn if they don’t have a high-quality experience in their first 7 days.
How can we drive users towards the most engaging experiences to maximize the chance their first purchase is a positive one?
The Solution(s)
Build a suite of surfaces and platform capabilities that guide users through each phase from content discovery, consideration, and acquisition to engagement.
The Explore App
Explore is the default landing experience for all Quest users. It is a powerful tool for introducing users to all the things they can do within the metaverse. Initially designed around app discovery, I facilitated many years of iteration on this surface towards a multi-facet surface that drives app, friend and activity discovery. While also increasing awareness and adoption of new VR use cases such as Media, Fitness and productivity among users.
The Oculus Store
The Oculus Store is the primary place users go to acquire VR apps on our platform. I worked extensively with this team to define the optimal discovery, consideration and acquisition journeys across VR, Web and Mobile to ensure users could make confident purchase decisions that resulted in a great VR experience.
VR experiences are like no other content type on the market, so we often found ourselves pondering design challenges such as “how might we give users the feeling of what a VR app is like, prior to purchasing?”
Search
Search was initially positioned as a high-intent utility that helped users find the apps they were already aware of. Over 3 years, I helped transition this towards a product that could handle high, medium and low-intent queries across multiple content types. And from simply a sub-feature of the Explore surface, to a platform-wide capability that any app could leverage to both find content and navigate the OS.
Notifications
A critical part of our ability to keep users engaged and extract the most value from their device & app purchases were the on and off-platform channels we had to reach users. I worked across our Channels team to mature the types of notifications our platform was able to send, both from the Oculus voice and by giving up developers the ability to do the same.
The Oculus Mobile App
While the Quest VR devices are the central piece of hardware users experience the Metaverse through, Mobile plays a huge role in keeping people engaged when they can’t be in VR. I worked extensively with the Oculus Mobile team to develop our mobile experience as a device remote device management, content discovery & acquisition and more recently, a sharing & engagement product that keeps users plugged into everything happening in VR. We aspired to make the app “The Window into the Metaverse”
Laddering all of our work up to a North Star.
Throughout my time in this role, I’ve intentionally carved out time for our teams to spend working on strategic long term visions of what our products could be and how they could feel. I believe that great product designers should be both solid executors, but be strong contributors to the strategic direction of the product. The following are snippets of several vision exercises I’ve driven that have guided our more tactical day-to-day work.
