Oculus Social Experiences

The Oculus Social Experiences team focuses on building a socially connected VR ecosystem. As a Product Design Intern, I had the opportunity to work on two core projects to help users find, chat, and play with others in VR.

You can learn more about some of my work that has been launched here.

Problem Overview: Import

On Oculus, players juggle multiple friend networks – in-game friends and platform friends. In its current state, in-game friends are often confined to a specific game, which limits interactions across the platform’s library of games and results in a less engaging experience. How might we help players lift in-game connections?

Understanding our Users

Users are more selective about their Oculus friends than Facebook friends. VR can be an intimate experience that involves sharing virtual spaces or voice chatting. Any friend made on the platform required high confidence and trust. I worked with UX Researchers to understands points of friction for our users.

The Current Experience

Without Import, users must manually ask people for their Oculus usernames (which can be different than their in-game names).

Once received, they exit the app and search for them at the platform level. As pictured below, profiles don’t provide adequate information to make the connection between profiles.

Because of these various pain points, users are often discouraged from lifting the in-game friendship to the platform.

Exploring New Mediums

Before jumping into ideation, it was essential to understand the Oculus Design System. The system included multiple surfaces (Farfield, nearfield, AUI) and multiple interaction models (controller, gestural, voice). Understanding these interaction models alongside our visual system ensured I could generate intentional, implementable designs.

Designing Import: Community-first

To tackle this problem, I worked through several explorations with my PM, design team, and engineering partners. These explorations included different entry points, visual components, and user mental models. The first design direction seeks to leverage the sense of “community” growing within each application.

This entry point, “Farfield,” is often used for app-centric actions such as launching apps and browsing new games. Implementing Import into the Farfield could help bridge the user’s mental model from an app communities to their friend network.

I worked with the Design System Team to evolve components that fit our use case. Facepiles and usernames contextualize profiles within a specific app.

Modals provide the user with additional context about profiles and icons to initiate interactions.

Designing Import: People-first

The second direction emphasizes people and the relationships they have built and offers a new source for friend suggestions. By providing users with an aggregated collection of people they have recently met, we ranked different profiles to make more intentional suggestions.

Providing Context

Surfacing friend suggestions is insignificant if users don’t recognize who these people are. Various points of metadata are used to provide a user with confidence about who they are adding as a friend.

These various points of context would remind a user of the in-app relationship they have already begun building.

Measuring Success

At the onset of this project, we wanted to ensure that people were creating meaningful social networks that were built upon shared interests. To measure the impact of this project, we examined at a combination of metrics.

Improvement on these metrics would verify the impact of Import and reenforce the importance of our tools in creating an effective social VR ecosystem.

Second Core Project

Connecting People in VR

Alongside my core internship project, I collaborated with the Social Experiences team on the top priority project of H2 2020, bringing Messenger to VR. In addition to Messenger integration, this project will release a revamped suite of tools for users to coordinate and play together with friends in VR. To learn more about the project, read the Oculus blog post and watch the Facebook Connect Keynote. Launched Q4 2020.

For this initiative, I helped refine visual components and prototype UX flows for engineering handoff and user research.

Reflection

This internship was an amazing experience that challenged me as a designer, communicator, and collaborator. VR is an inspiring space and I’m glad our team could help make it a more social place.