Virtual Reality UX Research Assistant at Meta

7 month role at Meta Reality Labs in 2021

As an assistant, my research focused on the Meta Quest 2 and the recently released Meta Quest Pro

In April of 2021, I started working as a UX research assistant on the Virtual Reality (VR) Hardware (HW) UX Research team at Meta. In partnership with my UXR team, I moderated and analyzed the results of several HW UX research studies. Some notable studies include:

A 70+ participant remote benchmarking study comparing VR inputs conducted over Zoom
A 40+ participant remote focus group study held through a combination of in-VR moderated activities and questioning through Zoom

During this time, I also directed a 4-month hardware study run through a research consultancy and conducted remote research studies for VR software, resulting in features publicly available today.

By the end of my role as a UXR assistant,

I quickly onboarded into the VR product space and learned how UXR fits into the HW product development cycle.
I owned the process for spinning up and executing a research study within Meta and through a research consultancy.
I honed efficiency in utilizing already existing infrastructure to limit delays/time loss in VR usability sessions, and proactively evangelized these practices with other researchers.

After 7 months as an assistant, I was promoted to a UXR III on the VR Hardware Team. I was given much more autonomy and responsibility as a UXR III, I became the lead researcher for a VR controller product.

Though I cannot publicize the majority of my work at Meta, below is a sampling of my research during my time as an assistant.

Quick Action Menu Rolling Research

One of the software features I worked on was the Quick Action Menu (QAM), which allows for additional menu functionality while using hand tracking. Hand tracking can be used to navigate VR experiences instead of a controller. The Quick Action Menu augments hand tracking by adding fast access to features that have shortcuts on the standard VR controller.

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Hand Tracking Introduction Tutorial

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Quick Action Menu Tutorial

Prior to the public release of the QAM, I was responsible for running a series of small rolling research studies utilizing the in-progress design of the QAM. For the full context on study methodology, results, and recommendations, check out this presentation from the final round of rolling research. I will give a brief overview of the study and design recommendations below.

Study Goals and Participant Profiles

In this study, I sought to gather preliminary qualitative insights on first-time user experience and overall user sentiment for the QAM. My primary areas of focus included:

Feature discovery
Iconography understanding
Ease of use (for opening the menu, enabling options, canceling selection, etc.)
User expectations/ideas for improvement

These studies were done remotely with a small number of internal employee "dogfooders," who were not familiar with this unreleased feature. Internal research proved the most effective method for these rolling research studies as it allowed me to put the feature onto employees work headsets remotely without obvious disclosure of the new feature.

Recommendations

As a result of my research, these design recommendations made their way into the final product:

Adding tooltips to the icon (for better accessibility and overall better comprehension)

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