Reilly Donovan

As design and prototyping lead I owned the experience end to end: the core planting and watering loop, the Polaroid camera and its printed, grabbable photo, the hand and grip states, the layout and pacing of the garden itself, and the visual direction of its assets. Meta open-sourced the build, so the finished experience — and the design decisions inside it — are still public. The team's work took Entertainment Experience of the Year at the 2023 Polys WebXR Awards.

For several years I led design prototyping across the Browser's feature surface — multi-window, freeform resize, tab management, immersive video, in-app browser access — one of a small group shaping how Quest's 2D platform would work. UX research validated those concepts, and engineering teams carried them to production across successive Quest OS releases. The browser served as the initial test bed: patterns proven there translated up to the system level as Quest's 2D platform matured. That feature area is now how most people use the headset: Meta reported in 2024 that over 60% of active Quest 3 users were multitasking with mixed reality panel apps.

I led design prototyping on the heads-up display and the rethink of how notifications reach you, and contributed to the wider remodel of Horizon OS toward its current system UI. Those concepts moved through UX research and informed Navigator — the system UI engineering teams carried into public testing in May 2025 (Horizon OS v77) and onto every Quest headset by June 2026. The problem underneath: what earns a place in your view, what can wait, and how something reaches you without taking over the moment you are in.

I led design prototyping of AI-driven productivity concepts inside Meta's AR glasses program — how a wearable assistant handles the small, frequent tasks that fill a day: responding to an invite, answering a message, moving a meeting, without pulling you out of what you're doing. The AR browser work was validated through UX research. Meta has publicly introduced Orion, its first true augmented reality glasses, as a product prototype informing that consumer AR glasses product line.