SAN FRANCISCO, CA
COPYRIGHT JAYSon.STUDIO 2025
Pain Point
As Spatial focuses more on Unity game developers, empathy & understanding between creators and the product team widens.
Pain Point
While retention has grown since the
'Spatial Economy' initiative, sales remain very low for most creators.
This could be an great opportunity to demonstrate my leadership skills through an internal initiative
Insight
Goals
Kickstart a project to deepen the design team’s empathy for Unity creators and pinpoint challenges hindering sales.
Open Questions:
When creating a space through Unity - what aspects are the most pain staking?
What skills can the design team develop to better support an increasingly video game-focused company?
How are creators currently selling items, and what factors are contributing to low conversion rates?
What’s the best way to secure team-wide support to move this project into production?
Research
What challenges do our creators face when building spaces, and why are they not converting well to sales?
Audit of current shopping experiences on Spatial against other successful alternative models.
Findings
Spatial
Shopping experiences often require users to run from item to item in 3D space. While this provides a unique shopping experience - it is inefficient for rapid item discovery and quick sales conversion.
Roblox
The marketplace primarily focuses on individual items, with secondary emphasis on their relationship to the avatar. Additionally, the minimal background and lack of free navigation for the avatar further concentrate the user on shopping rather than space discovery.
*Insight* Marketplace only sells "global" items (items that can be used across all experiences — not just one.
Fortnite
Similar to Roblox in structure and biasing toward highlighting items.
Similar to Roblox, Fortnite's store only sells "global" items. *Insight*
Unlike Roblox, Fortnite is heavily biased towards item "bundles" rather than individual items.
Development
Increase sales by limiting space navigation and increasing focus on (global) item discovery.
Optimizing the current Spatial shopping experience to better reflect Roblox and Fortnite.
Development (Low to High Fidelity)
Playtesting Feedback
90%
"What am I supposed to do when entering?"
Focus on the user's attention by auto-prompting the store when entering the space.
70%
"These items are not worth the money."
Introduce tiered pricing to help users compare assets relative to each other vs comparing items relative to external assets.
50%
"I wish there were categories"
Introduced categories and bundles following POC deployment to production.
Proof of Concept
Never. Stop. Creating.
Never. Stop. Creating.
Impact
How did this project lead to a real impact?
Prod
Initiative gets implemented into production
390%
Sales revenue exceeds the average revenue per space.
200%
Sales revenue exceeds other Spatial monetization initiatives.
Takeaways
Stakeholder buy-in increases as you emphasize the value the project brings to them, specifically.
Ensure the brief (problem & goals) is prominently surfaced near assigned tasks to increase visibility and reference.
Even in a lead role, seeking support is essential. Regular consultations with game developers and other PMs would have provided valuable insight into project timelines.
There seems to be a strong correlation between an items value and it's ability to be "shown off" to others.