Meta Horizon Worlds
Loading times on Horizon Worlds mobile range from 7 to 45 or more seconds depending on the world's multiplayer complexity, network, and device. That variability creates the highest-risk moment in the session: users deciding whether to wait it out or bail.
The existing solution was looping video game trailers that users passively watched on repeat (it wasn’t working).
org
Engagement
role
Product Designer
year
2025
Mobile
Vibe coding
Prototyping
Visual design
Product strategy
Interaction design
Stakeholder management
4-9%
average load for mobile deep linking
23-27%
APPROACH
From passive to purposeful
Instead of looping trailers that users passively watched on repeat, I hypothesized that giving people something fresh to do or learn during the wait would reduce abandonment.
Key insight
New users, returning users, and power users all need different things during those seconds. A new player needs to learn the basics. A returning player needs social pull. A power user just needs to not feel like they’re waiting.
ITERATION 1
Interactive onboarding tutorial
Concept
Turn loading into onboarding. An interactive tutorial teaches controls and mechanics while the world loads, so users arrive ready to play instead of passively waiting.
Why it didn’t ship
Engineering lift was too high for the timeline. Tying onboarding to the loading window created conflicts with latency performance, and the solution didn’t scale across different user types.
What shipped instead
An in-game interactive tutorial that activated once players landed in the world. Moving onboarding inside the game eliminated the load-time engineering conflicts and gave us a flexible framework that adapted to different experience levels.
Learning
The best design solution isn’t always the first one. Decoupling onboarding from loading gave us something more resilient, more scalable, and actually shippable.
ITERATION 2
Curated contextual cards
ITERATION 3
'Load Runner' Mini Game
Vision
Turn loading into play. Users opt into a quest where they run through a tunnel maze, collecting orbs and power-ups while the world loads behind the scenes. Wait time becomes play time.
Future potential
This concept got the team excited and repositioned the loading screen as a high-priority surface for future roadmaps. Sometimes the best design work isn’t what ships today. It’s a compelling vision that shifts how people think about a problem space.
