Meta’s “Horizon Worlds” experiencing a buggy journey 

I was going through some of the news items on an online publication – The Verge – yesterday and this headline caught my eyes – “Meta’s flagship metaverse app is too buggy and employees are barely using it, says exec in charge”

Let me give a background to this headline

So Meta formerly known as Facebook launched its flagship “metaverse” app, Horizon Worlds in 2021 as its response to emerging metaverse trend.

Horizon Worlds is a free virtual reality, online video game with an integrated game creation system developed and published by Meta Platforms for Oculus Rift S and Oculus Quest 2. Meta is working on a web version which should be released very soon.

This new report is admitting that the app is too buggy and even its employees are barely using it. It is so bad that Meta’s VP of Metaverse, Vishal Shah, said the product team would remain in a “quality lockdown” for the rest of the year to “ensure that we fix our quality gaps and performance issues before we open up Horizon to more users.”

“Since launching late last year, we have seen that the core thesis of Horizon Worlds — a synchronous social network where creators can build engaging worlds — is strong,” Shah wrote in a memo last month. “But currently feedback from our creators, users, playtesters, and many of us on the team is that the aggregate weight of papercuts, stability issues, and bugs is making it too hard for our community to experience the magic of Horizon. Simply put, for an experience to become delightful and retentive, it must first be usable and well crafted,” he added.

In an internal memo dated September 15, Shah admits that a primary issue with Horizon’s development to date, is that the people building it inside Meta appear to not be using it that much. According to him, “For many of us, we don’t spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly. Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”

In another memo dated September 30, Shah said that employees still weren’t using Horizon enough, writing that a plan was being made to “hold managers accountable” for having their teams use Horizon at least once a week. “Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it. Get in there. Organize times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds but also the public build so you can interact with our community.”

Despite these buggy journey, Meta spokesperson Ashley Zandy said the company is “confident that the metaverse is the future of computing and that it should be built around people.” She said the company is “always making quality improvements and acting on the feedback from our community of creators. This is a multiyear journey, and we’re going to keep making what we build better.”

This is a good story that would be used as a case study in the next New product development and management training coming up on the 27/28 of October 2022. 

• Did they use Agile Product Development for this Product?
• Did they fully test the product before releasing the product?
• How come these bugs were not addressed during User testing?

Click the link to know more and register to attend: https://bit.ly/3RO3Mui