A platform with a one-size-fits-all menu

Rec Room is a UGC social gaming platform where players aged 7–25 create, play, and socialize across VR, mobile, console, and PC. Players jump between short 10–15 minute experiences without a clear start or end. Discovery needs to feel like part of the core loop.

After two previous UI iterations, the current system (RRUI) prioritized implementation speed over player needs. As the product grew, the menu became cluttered, hard to navigate, and caused performance crashes on lower-end devices.

Through data analysis, CI surveys, player interviews, and Discord feedback, I identified three core issues:

The existing UI only served one type of player

I led research across CI surveys, Discord feedback, player interviews, and usage analytics, then validated findings through A/B experiments that confirmed not all features carry equal weight.

Using these insights, I mapped a golden path user journey to identify key pain points. Most friction lived in the discovery phase, where low intention players couldn't quickly find resonant content. I also spotted opportunities to surface meaningful content during play and replay to enhance the experience and inspire return visits. Parallels to real life social activities revealed further opportunities: contextual in-moment purchases and multiplayer UI where friends browse and decide together.

Distilling these findings with stakeholders, I defined browsing personas along two axes (tenure and intention) and discovered the existing UI only served high intention, long tenure players, leaving three of four quadrants underserved.

Usability & UI Surfaces

I started by questioning a fundamental constraint: does the UI always need to be full-screen? The existing system only allowed one surface size, making every interaction equally heavy.

Key Decision 1: Adaptive surfaces that scale to player focus

I designed adaptive UI surfaces that scale based on player intent: a lightweight menu for quick actions and full-page views for deep exploration.

After aligning with all stakeholders, I worked with the Creation UX Lead to establish Quick Access and Full Page as a unifying principle across the product.

Key Decision 2: Platform-native interactions from day one

Rather than retrofitting one design across platforms like RRUI, I advocated for a multi-platform approach from day one by optimizing for each platform's interaction modality, such as controllers vs. direct touch, sizing and spacing for display comfort, and haptic feedback where available.

For implementation, we decided to tackle one platform at a time, starting with the most impactful: mobile.

Information Architecture

Earlier IA explorations grouped features by activity or entity. While logical on paper, these required too much effort from low-intention players. I expanded the 'focused and adaptable' thinking into IA by creating a surface hierarchy framework that defines different types of UI surfaces based on the player's cognitive state and when they would encounter each one.

Key Decision 4: Motivation-based IA for the Quick Access menu

Five tabs maximum, each with independent widgets. The first three tabs serve low-intention players organized around intrinsic motivations: Relatedness, Autonomy, and Competence. The final tab uses action-based grouping for players who already know what they want.

Visual Design

Design Principles

A system that adapts to the player

A contextual menu rooted in the player's motivation, providing quick paths for casual players and depth for committed ones, all delivered in a platform-native, physically satisfying interface.

From vision to measurable impact

With revenue as the production goal, I drove the experiment roadmap by breaking the vision into testable hypotheses where each round built on the last.

Experiment Results

After 10+ experiments over 3 months, we increased revenue metrics through LLM-powered contextual content that matched items to game themes. This proved that in-the-moment relevance drives both player experience and business outcomes.

Player Sentiments

After the MVP launched, players shared positive sentiment, noting a more intuitive and less cluttered design.

Interfaces Framework for the Company

Widget Watch was the first application of a broader UI framework. The systems I created now influence how other teams make UI decisions.

How this shaped my practice

1. Principles and goals are the best alignment tool

During visual design, multiple directions were proposed based on personal aesthetic preferences, and conversations kept circling. Instead of debating style, the Revenue UX Lead and I defined what we needed the visual design to accomplish and filtered every direction through those lens. This shifted the conversation from "which do we like" to "which serves our goals," and produced a direction that resonated with players in survey testing, not just designers in review.

2. Start small to go big

When I first proposed Widget Watch, leadership, while agreeing with the principles and design, was concerned about disrupting live production and player experience. Rather than pushing for a full rollout, I proposed a vertical slice experiment that could validate the direction without a wholesale rebuild. This gave leadership confidence to iterate safely and gave the team a concrete deliverable instead of an abstract vision. Ambitious systems work earns trust through small, low-risk proofs, not through the strength of the pitch.

3. Take stakeholders along the journey

Early on, my instinct was to research independently and bring polished recommendations to stakeholders. The feedback was that this made some of them feel excluded from conclusions they hadn't been part of reaching. I shifted to running collaborative design sessions earlier, inviting stakeholders into research synthesis and rough exploration before anything was finalized. The result was stronger ideas because they brought context I didn't have, and smoother alignment because they'd helped shape the direction.