Tl;dr

I drove alignment towards a key business strategy by implementing CTA consistency and iconography across our internal design system. I partnered closely with product design to co-design a cohesive icon and CTA that users easily understood. Reducing friction resulted in daily active user (DAU) retention by +0.76%. 

Opportunity 

As the owner and lead for CTA consistency across the VR platform, I recognized the necessity for users to have clear mental models for actions. My hypothesis was that simplifying the complex concept of embodied virtual travel for users would drive traffic to Meta Horizon Worlds. Creating a tangible metaphor of transporting yourself from one “place” in VR to another was a key business initiative and a fun challenge. 

Solution

Creating a consistent travel metaphor that could flex to different scenarios was a requirement to enable both solo and social actions. The narrative needed to be clear to users that the different CTAs had different end points. With leadership buy-in, I partnered with product design and user experience research (UXR) to develop new icon glyphs alongside different CTAs to represent the range of actions the user could take. 

• I conducted a system-wide CTA audit to understand how and where travel was used.   

• I developed a framework for CTA variants that allowed for different actions and space constrained context like mobile or modals.

• Collaborated with product design and UXR to prototyped and test different variants to ensure user comprehension.

• Drove leadership alignment and approval on the designs and CTAs.

• Implemented adoption of changes into the internal design system used across all platforms, including mobile and VR. 

Takeaway 

The collaboration between content and product design resulted in a cohesive and coherent metaphor that users easily understood. Unifying the CTA language and icon consistency across the system resulted in improving retention with daily active users (DAU) by +0.76%. Reducing friction was a small but meaningful UI improvement that also laddered up to a key business initiative of increasing Meta Horizon Worlds usage.