Virtual Reality Payments Research & Prototype
Overview
This was an innovation exploration project from my first year as a Product Designer at a large fintech company (2022-2023). It gave me exceptional early-career exposure to emerging technology, customer-facing presentations, and working with minimal established design patterns.
The Challenge:
Following a company conference where third-party VR use cases were demonstrated, our innovation team set out to build our own VR payments prototype. The goal was to explore how our fintech company could leverage Virtual Reality for payment experiences — a space with virtually no established UX patterns at the time.
My Role:
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UX Researcher & Designer
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Led research and design alongside one UX Prototype Developer
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Demoed the final prototype to customers and partners at a London event
The Team:
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Innovation Europe & US labs (small, cross-continental team)
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Just two designers driving the entire UX process
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Direct collaboration with innovation leadership
Project Scope:
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6 month timeline (research through demo)
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Ground-up research: surveys, interviews, and analysis
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Design exploration in emerging Figma 3D capabilities (largely undocumented at the time)
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Customer-facing demo at major company even
Research
Survey
Before going straight into designing a prototype, we had to do our research. We didn't just want to develop a cool prototype for the sake of it, we seen some real value and genuine use cases we could harness. So this survey help give us new ideas and validate our current ideas.
Objectives
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Establish personas of people using VR. Age, gender, demographic etc.​
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Establish use cases of VR. What are people currently doing in VR?​
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Gauge interest in potential new use cases of VR.​
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Validate idea of hotel website using VR.​
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Find out people's thoughts around and willingness to pay in while in VR.​
Survey Results
Interview
Objectives
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Gain deeper insights into users's thoughts, behaviours and context of use.
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This was part of the same survey, with the same questions. But as people spoke their minds and their thoughts we got much greater insights that complimented the quantitative numbers well.
Analysis
Use Case
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Our solution was a hotel booking platform in VR. Where users can view hotel and hotel rooms in VR and then proceed to book and pay for them.
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This use case aligned with both user research and our business's current customer base and verticals. (ie hospitality is one of our most important areas)
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Key insights indicated how users are already using VR to visit holiday/tourist destinations as well as viewing potential homes to buy/rent.
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Our research also indicated when booking hotels user's find it difficult to understand a rooms measurements (meters squared) and often you cannot gauge the size of the room from the photos. Yet the size of the room is one of the most important factors in choosing a room.
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So with this research we had validated a genuine use case that solves user's problems while using technology that user's are already familiar with.
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But we always had to keep in mind how users are reluctant to pay in VR due to security concerns.
The Prototype
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Following on from this research was months of work inside Figma. Designing and refining our hotel booking flow, ensuring it was useable and worked inside the headset.
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This was both myself and the other designer's first time working in VR which brings its own challenges.
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You cannot just use a desktop UI, you need to be mindful of tap targets size and positioning.
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There also is not a lot of help and support for designing in VR. We had to make sure the 360 view of the rooms actually functioned as a 360 environment.
Figma
The demo inside VR
The Event
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I was then invited to London for a company event to demo our prototype.
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This was a follow up to the previous year where we demoed capabilities of VR but this year it was our own in house work.
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We had a stand set up with 3 headsets where customers, partners and colleagues could try the demo themselves.
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We wanted to showcase how the product would function in reality with multiple rooms to view and multiple payment methods users could choose.
Project Outcome
Following the London demo, the VR payments concept was shelved as the innovation team pivoted to other priorities. I transitioned to a more traditional role with work on checkout payment pages and a customer onboarding application where I could have more direct product impact. While this didn't become a product, it was valuable as an innovation exploration that validated customer pain points and tested emerging technology feasibility.
Reflections: Innovation vs. Product
Early Career Context:
This project took place in my first year as a Product Designer, and it was a formative experience. Working with just one other designer, I led research and design for cutting-edge technology with minimal documentation, then demoed to customers and partners at a major London event. This level of autonomy and exposure early in my career accelerated my growth significantly.
What This Project Taught Me:
Not every exploration becomes a product — and that's the point of innovation work. The goal was learning, not shipping.
Key Learnings:
- User interest ≠ market readiness (VR adoption was too low)
- Technology novelty ≠ business value (hotels wouldn't invest in 360° photography)
- Early validation matters (should have tested riskiest assumptions first)
- Working with emerging tech (Figma's 3D capabilities were brand new) requires experimentation and comfort with uncertainty
Applied to Future Work:
- Brought stronger validation mindset to subsequent product work
- Learned to recognize when to explore vs. when to execute
- Developed better intuition for market timing and feasibility
- Built confidence tackling ambiguous problems — skills I now apply to 0→1 product work at IBM
What I'd Do Differently Now:
With more experience, I would run lighter validation experiments before heavy design investment, and focus on desirability + feasibility in parallel, not just desirability. I'd also test the riskiest assumption first: "Will hotels actually invest in 360° photography?"
The Real Value:
While VR payments didn't ship, this project gave me exceptional early-career exposure to innovation work, stakeholder presentations, and emerging technology — experiences that shaped how I approach product design today.