Oculus VR (MetaQuest) is the industry leading virtual reality platform for gaming and media experiences. Bringing immersive content to the next level with the excitement of social experiences from Meta.
Projects
Media Discovery
Immersive Previews
Notifications
Quest TV
Browsing
What to watch in VR from 2D to 3D
Role
Product Designer
Services
UX/UI Design
Information Architecture
After gaming, media was the highest use case for people who used Oculus VR. Quest TV is the 1st party platform for watching media content in VR. I lead design on the Media Discovery team, working to ensure the landing and browsing experience was engaging for new and existing users.
Decision Decisions
Choosing what to watch in VR and understanding the varying content types left much to be desired for the majority of users. We saw people watching media content but rarely returning with a 65% month over month churn rate.
Building Excitement & Understanding
Our goal based on the user problems we received from our user research team was to ensure the right content was getting to the right users and that people had access to the breadth and depth of media in a way that feels informative. We measured success by the improvement of:
- Length of watch sessions
- Frequency of sessions
Building Towards a Goal
We scoped our work into 3 phases (Primary, Tecondary and Tertiary) working from the bottom up while still allowing for incremental discovery and improvements
Taxonomy & Systems
Collaborating between taxonomist, marketing, and user research we began developing clear category and informational systems. This led the way for a clear structure for presenting information on our content cards and anywhere else in the UI ecosystem
Qualitative Success
- Ability to log user behavior categorically enabled Machine Learning personalization efforts
- Our programming teamwas able to create playlists that automatically consolidated content with similar categories, resulting in reduced shelves in browse from ~130 to ~40 (*avg scroll 7-10).
Product Impact We saw average time spent watching media increase +1.8%
- We saw return visits to QuestTV increase +2.2%
Personalizing the Experience
I worked closely with our programming team to build out a system that prioritized content based on where the user was in their journey. This helped avoid a one-size-fits all approach that was previously being used.
IA & Navigation
Once the structure and systems were in place organizing the navigation structure was the next task to allow categorically structured browsing. We also wanted to make exploring content easier by providing simple and quick access to specific types of content based on a users range of experience with VR media.
New Feature Launches Working with the ML team and 3P partnerships we were able to launch 3/6 new personalization shelves based on success in testing
Quality Impact We were able to reduce vertical occlusion by 20% using the new nav UI allowing more content to be visible. Exposed a secondary navigation enabling programming to surface more content sooner.
Results
In addition to launching personalized shelves we saw an overall monthly increase in retention by 2.2%
Immersive Previews
Bringing full immersion into the decision making process
Role
Product Designer
Services
UX/UI Design
VR Prototyping
Regardless of the surface or platform deciding what to watch is a universal experience that can be frustrating. In virtual reality, media spanned multiple formats between 2D, 3D, 360 and multiple different areas between. Our team believed that the ability preview content and how it was done would help remove some of the frustration for the age old question "What should I watch?"
Jump in Jump Out
Choosing what to watch in VR was difficult to accomplish from a flat image. Most users had to go through the tedious task of starting an experience then exiting out after a few seconds if it was not great and repeating this over and over again.
Jump Between Realities
Our goal was to create a mechanism that allowed people to easily "scroll" through immersive content.
Results
We were able to define and patent a new ergonomic interaction model for VR media browsing.
Notification
Preferences
Quest TV is the media platform for watching media content in VR.
Role
Product Designer
Tasks
UX/UI Design
Notifications provide contextual and engaging content to Oculus users across every channel to guide and empower them to consistently enter VR. Oculus notifications spanned across multiple surfaces and channels including VR, mobile, web, and email.
Limited Control
Notifications were grouped into a limited set of categories.
Users were not in control of how Oculus reaches them, via notification, about things they didn’t care about. This caused frustration from users because they couldn't opt out of an individual notifications without completely disabling all notifications under that ambiguous grouping.
More Control
Our goal was to provide users with more controls to personalize their VR experience based on interests, communication style across Oculus surfaces and apps.
We also wanted to enable developers to create notifications to maintain audience reach through an app-centric preference model.
Some Apps for All
We needed to provide ntoification controls at a much larger scale in both system settings as well as the notifications UI itself through an app-centric notification system.
Redefining Internal Systems
We built out a strong taxonomical system restructured around both better internally based groups and also enabling individual app experiences rather than a one size fits all approach for all notifications.
VR Preferences
The notification settings was updated to allow individual app controls. We also allowed users to control their mobile app settings while in headset, which was previously not possible.
Developing for Mobile
We worked with the mobile app team to ensure a synomous both in and out of VR for controlling notifications
Results
Users having more control over their notifcations through app centric notification preferences resulted in an 6% increase in notification click-through rates.
