The new task update reimagines the landing page, again reorganizing your app library

Instead of taking you straight to your library of installed apps, Meta is making another confusing change to the Quest landing page in v57.

Since the early days of Meta’s VR platform, the company seems to have been obsessed with not putting your VR app library first.

Instead, the first thing you see when you put on the company’s headphones, or launch its companion smartphone app, is some kind of dynamic ‘feed’ of content you weren’t looking for. search from the start.

The ‘Explore’ page is always changing

For a long time, putting Quest first, Meta made you look at ‘Discovery’, an algorithmically curated collection of disparate content that wasn’t your library of installed apps.

It seems forever unhappy when people don’t Love For the Explore page, Meta has continually redesigned it over the years, changing the layout seemingly every six months. I swear every time I get used to it, it changes.

And again, it will change.

In the latest Quest v57 update, Meta is replacing the Explore landing page with a new and confusing ‘Horizon Feed’, which also isn’t your library of installed apps.

Logically, you might think that the Horizon Feed would only contain content from Horizon Worlds, acting as a kind of portal for you to jump into the company’s little universe. But no, obviously in Horizon Feed you will find all kinds of games, apps and of course Stories!

Yes, Reels… the company’s short-form 2D video content is designed for quick and casual viewing on smartphones. Certainly when I put on my headphones, that’s what I want to see—not my library of installed apps.

Below the fold

Even the headset’s companion smartphone app, the ‘Meta Quest’ app, doesn’t want to make it easy to access its library of installed apps. Instead, the first thing you see when you launch the app is a bit of algorithmically curated content—a feed, of course—that you weren’t looking for when you put on the headphones in the first place.

Did you know that you can actually remotely launch VR apps on the Quest right from the smartphone app? It’s extremely convenient.

Or maybe so, but most people don’t even know it’s possible because to even find the installed app library you need to launch the smartphone app, click ‘Menu’ (last option on the toolbar), then Scroll down to below the fold to finally find ‘My Library’. Counting from the top of the page, this is the 17th item in the list of Menu items. It has moved further and further down the page over the years.

Literally, ‘Parental Monitoring’ and ‘Help and Support’ are placed higher on the list than your library of installed apps.

Does Meta really think that Parental Monitoring (which doesn’t even apply to many users) and Help and Support (how often do you think people need help with this product) will be easy? reach beyond the user’s installed app library? ?

Give me food

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that Meta is obsessed with algorithmically curated feeds. It’s what defines a company’s core products (e.g., Facebook, Instagram), and small changes to their feed algorithms can have a big impact on how long people stay on their feeds. that platform and their level of engagement.

But here’s the core problem with Meta’s feed obsession. While casual and mindless scrolling is the norm on smartphones—devices can be connected and disconnected in a matter of seconds—this couldn’t be further from the truth for VR headsets.

Anyone wearing a VR headset has good reason to bother wearing it in the first place.

They already know what they want to do; get in between them and it just hurts the user experience. If you want to hit them with a feed, do it Later They accomplished what they originally intended to do. And while you’re at it… maybe instead of hiding their installed app library—you know, the content they’ve hand-picked and paid for—why not make it easy for users to launch them than from the beginning to make it easier for them will they come back?

Of course now everyone at Meta is reading this and saying ‘we have all these stats showing that people actually click on stuff in the feed!’ I’m sure you know… and that’s because it’s something you put in front of them on a regular basis.

Metrics will lead you astray if you don’t measure the right things. You better believe that friction—the process of wearing headphones and achieve what you really want to do—is and has long been one of VR’s biggest problems. If that’s not what you’re optimizing for (These feeds certainly don’t) then you are crippling the overall user experience.

It’s those people do not back to the headphones you should be looking at most carefully, not looking to see if you can direct someone to another piece of content after they’ve decided to put the headphones on.

The complete opposite of Meta’s approach is Apple Vision Pro. When you put on your headphones, what is the first thing you see? Your installed apps library.