AR Glasses

High-level overview of the projects and programs I led for the AR Glasses product line at Meta Reality Labs.

What I did at Meta Reality Labs

Summary

During my time at Meta RL, I worked on two primary pillars of the forthcoming AR Glasses product line: [1] AR communications and [2] digital human representations (DHR). These two pillars represent hero experiences that differentiate our AR glasses from our competitors.

At the highest level of abstraction, the progression of my time at RL can be characterized as independent → collaborative. This was largely a reflection of how our product development progressed.

When I first arrived, the various pillars of AR glasses were being built up more independently. I took ownership of specific aspects of AR communications and immediately began leading own end-to-end studies before taking over a rolling research program shortly afterwards. During this time I was embedded within two cross-functional teams (XFN) that included designers, engineers, and product managers. 

Our product experiences began converging as product development progressed, but our teams were still quite siloed. My scope and responsibilities expanded during this time as I gained the trust of my research managers and XFN. I began supporting a third XFN team focusing on DHRs. Noticing gaps and redundancies across our workstreams, I pivoted to a more collaborative research model. This involved things like:

  • cultivating relationships & synergies with researchers and XFN outside my immediate org
  • anticipating XFN needs and looping in appropriate research teams to help us #movefast
  • identifying my own research opportunities to fill knowledge gaps

All of this was done within the context of an extremely ambiguous, rapidly evolving set of problem spaces as new technologies and constraints were discovered. Supporting 3 different teams, I’ve had to (and currently do) prioritize and synergize disparate stakeholder needs quickly and effectively to hit key product milestones while aligning with org- and team- level OKRs.

Methodology

  • Interview
  • Concept testing
  • Survey (planned)
  • Card sort (planned)
  • Usability
  • Diary study (planned)
  • Participatory design
  • JTBD synthesis
  • Literature review
  • Hueristic analysis
  • Needs-based assessment
  • Rapid ethnography (planned)
  • Contextual inquiry (planned)
  • Thematic analysis
  • Descriptive & inferential statistical analysis
  • Video editing

Impact

  • Informed product direction and helped product teams quickly pivot by delivering timely primary & secondary research insights.
  • Developed an experiential quality framework for an important aspect of synchronous communication via AR Glasses.
  • Improved executive-level buy-in by helping PM leads showcase UXR efforts in product reviews
  • Improved product quality by:
    • advocating for new experiences that more closely aligned with user needs
    • refining proposed experiences to align with users’ current mental models
    • advocating for data-driven UXR perspectives during director-level product decisions
  • Increased product velocity by:
    • repurposing/adapting previous research to emerging stakeholder needs
    • suggesting lighter-weight research efforts and methods that still met stakeholder needs
  • Increased research velocity by running rolling research programs vs conducting ad-hoc studies
  • De-siloed orgs by facilitating relationships and collaboration across previously unassociated research and XFN teams.
  • Highlighted and advocated for the accessibility potential of RL products by:
    • informing product decisions for AR glasses
    • running Meta-wide demo’s seen by executives and Zuck’s reports.

Example Studies

[coming soon]