New-user education · 2025

Meta Horizon NUX

Find the fun first. Teach in the moment.

New users came to socialize, but Horizon asked them to choose a world, consent, complete fourteen-plus lessons, and wait through loading before they met anyone. I worked with product design, product management, engineering, and partner teams to replace the curriculum with a just-in-time education strategy.

Results

Measured against the onboarding it replaced

+13% first-world visits
+7% retention

Role: Content designer · education strategy and interaction language
Team: Social Coordination V Team
Timeline: 2025
Surface: Meta Horizon Worlds, first-run VR

What I did

Authored the just-in-time principles that became the foundation for how Horizon teaches users.
Wrote every string in the just-in-time flow, including the controller nudge.
Negotiated with Privacy Legal, Policy, and Product Counsel to consolidate six legal sequences into one tandem inform-and-remind design.
Reframed the leadership review around getting people to the fun faster; it secured leads' buy-in with minimal pushback.

Product design owned the final interaction and visual design; engineering and partner teams handled implementation and experiment analysis.

Problem: the curriculum was the wrong shape for a social product

Every proposal on the table made the curriculum shorter or better sequenced. I argued the curriculum itself was the wrong shape. VR was already a new skill, and front-loading fourteen-plus lessons added information overload before anyone had context to use it. It also ignored the medium's advantage: education could live on the control and action that needed it, appear when someone tried, and stay silent otherwise.

A welcome panel asks new Horizon Worlds users to follow a blue line and visit tutorial stations before exploring. — A standalone tutorial panel before anyone to meet: one stop on the fourteen-plus-lesson syllabus this case replaces.

Solution: the lesson lives on the control that performs it

When someone tried to talk while muted, the answer appeared on the controller already in their hand, where the old flow opened a panel. A second touch on a skill triggered off a change in the person's state, never a timer.

In-headset capture of the shipped nudge. I wrote the string; the interaction was built with the product designer and engineering.

A floating 2D panel titled 'Looking for worlds?' describing a controller button, with two cropped photos of the controller. — A floating panel describing "this left button" and leaving the person to find it on the controller in their own hands.

The controller in the person's own hand, menu button ringed in cyan, with a tooltip anchored to the button by a drawn leader line. — A floating panel describing "this left button" and leaving the person to find it on the controller in their own hands.

The front-loaded consent wall was one of six separate legal sequences across Horizon OS and Worlds, each its own block of text, and none of them could simply be cut. The resolution treated transparency as a property of the system rather than a screen: I negotiated a new location for the full inform modal in the mobile app, at a moment that met our transparency obligations and felt like the right time to read it, and the in-world notice became a one-line reminder, "Your audio is recorded for safety and other features," with a Learn more link. Inform on mobile, remind in-world. One tandem design met the legal bar and localization's character limits in every language, on both surfaces.

A dense modal titled What to know before you explore, with separate sections about audio and video recording and data use — The upfront notice asked someone to read two dense disclosures before exploring.

A compact toast reads Your audio is recorded for captions and safety features, with a Learn more action — The upfront notice asked someone to read two dense disclosures before exploring.

Proof: Meta Quest onboarding adopted the just-in-time model

The team that owns onboarding across Meta Quest picked up the model afterward. The design goal from the start: an onboarding people finish without remembering being taught.

Building this meant designing the strategy, the strings, the legal design, and the leadership framing as one system. That is the shape of content design work I do now.

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