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::XBOX APP REDESIGN
TLDR;
Brought in to design one piece of the Xbox app for Quest. Ended up redesigning the whole thing.
Originally scoped to a single flow. What I found when I looked closer made it impossible to stop there. The app was outdated, unmaintainable, and didn't reflect the ambition of the launch it was built for.
So I pushed to own it entirely.
CONTEXT
The Xbox app on Meta Quest was the hero experience for the Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition, Meta's first-ever collaborative headset. It was a high stakes launch. The kind where the product and the hardware had to succeed together. I was originally scoped to one corner of it. What I found when I looked closer made it impossible to stop there.
PROBLEM
The app was built on an outdated design system with no infrastructure for light or dark mode. Tons of custom logic had accumulated over time, making it borderline unmaintainable. The assets were pulled from old Quest interaction paradigms that no longer reflected where the platform had gone. It didn't feel like a flagship experience. It felt like a port.
For a launch that was supposed to sell hardware, that wasn't good enough.
TAKING OWNERSHIP
I pushed to redesign the entire app. That meant wrangling new assets with the art team, rebuilding toward a scalable system that could support both light and dark mode, and stripping out screens wherever possible to reduce time to play. Every extra tap between a user and their game was a problem worth solving.
It also meant aligning teams who weren't originally in scope, including NUX, HzOS Art, and Partner Engineering, and holding the quality bar across all of them through design reviews and decisions made in the open.
The result was a fresh app with new art, new flows, and a foundation that could actually be maintained and extended.
THE REDEMPTION DECISION
Every Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition unit shipped with an Xbox Game Pass code. Redeeming it was supposed to happen in the headset. That was the plan.
I questioned it.
The in headset experience required users to log into Microsoft to redeem the code. Even with the code auto populated via URL, typing in a headset is painful. Worse, we assumed a significant number of Xbox users authenticate via Microsoft Authenticator or email, or text, which meant they had to remove the headset anyway. The flow was at least six extra screens deep. For a moment that should have felt like a reward, it felt like homework.
My proposal: make email the primary redemption method. During the phone pairing experience at NUX, when the user is already on their phone, we send the code to their email automatically. No headset typing, no authentication friction, no removing the device. We kept in headset as a fallback for users who wanted it, but it stopped being the default.
This decision was likely the most impactful decision that drove a 65% code redemption rate with zero exceptions on launch.
OUTCOME
The app shipped on time for the Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition. The headset sold out MDC UK and US channels in under three days. The Xbox app earned a 4.8 out of 5.0 rating on Best Buy US, with coverage from Tom's Guide and a YouTube video from SpawnPoint exceeding 800k views. The redemption flow we built became the foundation for future campaigns, with the first planned for Summer Sale 2025.
The metrics I can directly own: a 65% redemption rate (a 20x lift over prior benchmarks), a scalable system that hadn't existed before, and an app quality bar that reflected the ambition of the launch it was built for.
"The best version of this product wasn't in the brief. It rarely is."
CONTACT
TERENCEKIM
@TERENCEKIM
TERENCE.TAEHEE.KIM@GMAIL.COM
::DESIGN THE FUTURE