Horizon Core Loop
Meta Horizon is a social VR metaverse on Quest. I led the design of its Quest & Reward core loop — a scalable system to help millions of players discover worlds, find things to do, and express who they are.
View websiteLead Designer · End-to-end design of the Quest & Reward core loop
+2 Designers, partnering with Research, Game & Content Design, PM and Engineering
14 Months · V1 (MVP)
Meta Quest VR · Horizon Worlds
Horizon's drop-off rate was high — good content was hard to discover. The business goalwas to lift engagement across top worlds and move Horizon's retention. The user goalwas just as important: most visitors were new to VR and didn't know where to begin, and their avatars — their digital reflection — needed real ways to express who they are.
Approach
I structured the work in five phases — from exploring the problem space and defining design principles, through the Quest and Reward systems, to a launched product and the metrics that confirmed the hypothesis.
Discovery
I worked closely with Research, Design, PMs, Game Designers, Content Designers and Engineering leads to define the problem space, curate design principles and set a roadmap for the team — organizing design sprints and workshops to establish the core design principles that would carry through the project.
Opportunities
Conducted horizon journey map to identify key quest opportunities
Quest cards are the atomic unit of the system — a surface that had to communicate world identity, quest type, difficulty, and reward at a glance. Getting the card right meant the whole system could scale. Getting it wrong meant players would ignore it entirely.
Quest cards iterations
Quest cards had to balance exciting players about new worlds with clear, scannable information — descriptive labels, intuitive categories, and prominent reward callouts that kept players focused on what they’d earn.
Final Quest Card Design
The final quest card design distilled everything we learned — striking a balance between visual excitement and functional clarity. Every element earned its place.
Card states
Quest cards had to read clearly across many states — available, in-progress, ready-to-claim and completed — so players always knew what to do next at a glance.
Rewards are avatar items, emotes and name-tag customizations players unlock by completing quests. They give players a way to find their individuality — fine-grained customizations and a unique way to express themselves in Horizon.
Designing the rewards
Before landing the system, we ran sorting exercises to understand how players value rewards, defined a rarity model, and iterated on the inventory and closet where players equip everything they've earned.
Reward iterations
Reward designs went through multiple rounds of exploration — balancing visual appeal, rarity signalling, and clarity so players could instantly understand the value of what they'd earned.
Reward System
From avatar items to emotes and name-tag customisations — the reward system gave players a meaningful way to express who they are in Horizon.
Recognition for AI Avatars work
Worked on AI avatar called Fin, which got introduced during the Meta 2024 Connect event.
The core loop delivered against its hypothesis — and its scalable design earned a place on Horizon's roadmap for future evolutions like Economy and UGC tooling.