Immersive Experience

HTC Creative Labs

New virtual reality headset and system software for business

Role

Principal Researcher

Year

2019–2022

Impact

Helped transition HTC’s VR strategy from consumer to enterprise

Design Challenge: refocus HTC’s VR strategy from consumer to enterprise, replacing internal opinion with real customer research and usability evidence.

Result: research built trusted relationships with customers and directly shaped product design decisions — engineering and sales teams began requesting more research on their own.

HTC Creative Labs was a small innovation team in Seattle, owned by HTC in Taiwan. As Principal Researcher, I initiated exploration studies with customers and developers to shape design strategy for our product pipeline — from hardware feature requirements to new system software interaction models, such as gestural interfaces for hand tracking.

Strategy research focused on businesses with significant VR initiatives: surveys, fieldwork, and 50 in-depth interviews across 15 industries. In parallel, UX research ran nine months of usability testing across the U.S. and Taipei — covering ergonomics, gestural control, and content — steadily refining our tools for remote testing through the Covid shutdown.

Persona slide ‘Build Trust & Acceptance’: an architecture firm converting a historic building into a theatre for live VR performances, with personas Alex, Abbey, Ahn, actors, and the public — I created personas based on actual case studies where VR would bring substantial value to an industry or business.

The work surfaced clear priorities about refining device management for developers and IT, making hand tracking more intuitive to ease adoption, and eliminating setup frustration so that new users felt delight with the first experience.

“We love the form factor and the usability.” — Sector 5 Digital

HTC Vive Focus 3 virtual reality headset on a table — Research helped define the fit and comfort of new hardware for Vive Focus.

VR headset tutorial screen showing how to turn passthrough mode off — Research tested laser beam hand controls for VR setup.

First-person VR view of hands using gestural controls on a settings panel — Typing and precise selection in VR was a challenge informed by research.