Early-stage concept visualization for a major tech company's VR work environment, translating usability research into a product vision before the product existed.

The Problem

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A major tech company was building its own approach to VR headsets for workplace use and needed to understand how that environment should actually function. Usability research existed. What didn't exist was a visual language for translating those findings into something developers could build toward and stakeholders could react to. There were only a few reference images and a research report. That was the starting point.

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My Role

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I worked as the sole creative strategist on early-stage concept visualization. I took UX research findings and gave them a physical form in space. The decisions I was making about layout, information hierarchy, and how notifications interrupt a user weren't aesthetic calls. They were product calls.

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What I Built

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I developed 40 sketch-based research artifacts mapping how productivity tools  such as browsers, calendars, documents, and notification systems would need to behave in a 3D shared workspace. Each sketch was a product hypothesis drawn directly from usability research. The spatial relationships, interruption logic, and information hierarchy in each frame represented a specific finding about how people manage cognitive load and social presence in shared digital environments. This was pre product work as there was no interface to reference, no design system to work within, and no existing category of VR productivity tool with established conventions. The constraint was generative: with no prior art, every spatial and interaction decision was available

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What Changed

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The research artifacts became the first shared visual language for the product. They were the artifact that subsequent research rounds, design sprints, and stakeholder conversations were built against. In early-stage product work, that's the highest leverage output: not the final design, but the first frame everyone agrees to think inside.

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What I Learned
 

When you're the first person to visualize something, your framing choices become everyone else's default assumptions. The windows I placed and the spatial logic I chose were the first draft of what the product thought it was. That's a different kind of responsibility than designing within an existing system. It's also where the line between communication design and product strategy gets thin enough that it doesn't matter which side you're on.