Masterpiece X: discovery for a new VR creation app.

In late 2021, Masterpiece Studio's leadership committed to building a new standalone VR 3D creation app — what would become Masterpiece X. The bet: a modern, headset-only experience that didn't require a tethered PC, reaching a wider audience than the existing PC-based tool.

Funding came with strings. Investor stakeholders had non-negotiable feature requirements that needed to land in the V1 launch. The design problem wasn't how to fit those features in despite users — it was how to fit them in without sacrificing usability.

I was the sole UX designer, reporting to the project manager. (A Senior UX Lead joined later in the project's life cycle.) The discovery phase ran from late 2021 into early 2022 and laid the groundwork everything downstream was built on.

Drawn from existing user research, QA interviews, and secondary research on creative / 3D / VR / metaverse enthusiasts. The personas covered a wider audience than the existing PC tool — content creators, artists, educators, students, developers, metaverse users — each tagged with the behaviours and desires the app needed to serve.

A table covering dozens of competing apps — not narrowly by category, but by the problems they solved. Each app evaluated against the V1 requirement set. Team members took ownership of specific apps to deepen the analysis; the table ran wider and deeper than a single designer could produce alone — 9 more rows and ~10 more columns than fit in the published artifact.

Every research note and feature request became a virtual sticky. I bucketed them — new features, takes on existing features, preferences, compatibility with other workflows. The buckets were the precondition to prioritization.

Impact and feasibility scored separately and by the team best positioned to evaluate each axis. Designers voted on impact (closest to user value). Developers voted on feasibility (closest to the implementation cost). Splitting the vote reduced bias and accelerated alignment.

Four teammates plus me each produced rough low-fi designs, prioritising the high-impact / high-feasibility ideas. After show-and-tell, I synthesised into an amalgamated low-fi prototype — combined ideas, single coherent flow.

I built the interactive low-fi in Figma, with each flow tied to a clear objective. With limited time and no in-house user-testing infrastructure, the team outsourced testing to a trusted third party. I wrote the moderator's guide and the flow instructions. 8 test participants worked through the prototype; the insights fed directly back into engineering's V1 specs.

V1 of Masterpiece X shipped. Engineering built on the foundation the discovery phase produced. The project later pivoted in focus, and design ownership transferred to other team members — typical of a multi-year creative-tools project. The discovery work documented here is what got V1 to a defensible launch.