Matterport’s Discover site allows you to browse hundreds of thousands of 3D spaces, captured from around the world. Explore featured spaces and collections across diverse categories - all curated by our experts and community members. With self-guided virtual tours, you can experience the history and adventure of the world at your own pace—from anywhere.
Matterport was the host of over 10 million 3D spaces, but sadly had no dedicated, curated destination to showcase them.
Existing sharing tools were overly utilitarian and failed to showcase the creative potential of the platform.
As a result, Matterport was missing an opportunity to elevate its brand, inspire new users, and celebrate its vibrant creator community.
Matterport needed an immersive and engaging platform to showcase their cutting-edge technology and the spaces captured with it. Previous efforts failed to showcase the breadth and depth of what was possible on the platform. Matterport Discover aimed to fill this gap by offering a 3D gallery website that worked as a window into the world's treasures.
Discover aimed to:
Improve brand perception and product storytelling
Drive awareness and traffic for Matterport capture professionals.
Serve as an onboarding funnel for new subscribers and underserved verticals
This was one of my first projects at Matterport, so I began by immersing myself in the platform and its ecosystem to build a deep understanding of our users and their diverse needs. Matterport’s audience spans multiple industries and includes three distinct personas: the photographers and creators who capture 3D spaces, the organizations who hire them and own those spaces, and the end users who view the spaces, ranging from professionals to the general public, depending on the industry.
To design an experience that met the needs of all three groups, I worked to clarify what each of them valued most. For photographers, sharing their work on a high-visibility platform could help them showcase their skills, attract new clients, and learn from peers. For property owners and managers, particularly in industries such as real estate, hospitality, and architecture, the focus was on promoting their businesses, driving traffic and bookings, and maintaining control over how their spaces were shared and viewed. For end users, the goal was to make discovering and exploring Matterport spaces enjoyable and intuitive, helping them understand the platform's capabilities, often as a first step toward becoming customers themselves.
With our users' needs in mind, I researched a wide variety of reference sites to guide our design direction. I examined gallery and discovery platforms such as Sketchfab, ArtStation, Behance, and Pinterest to understand how creative works are curated and showcased. Additionally, I analyzed property-focused platforms like Airbnb, Redfin, and Zillow, particularly their high-end real estate listings, to see how they present space, detail, and interactivity in order to attract viewers. These references helped us find a balance between utility, aesthetics, and clarity as we developed a solution that could support discovery across multiple verticals and meet the diverse needs of our user base.
One of the key design decisions we made for Matterport Discover was to prioritize curation over crowdsourcing. Instead of allowing anyone to upload content, we opted to carefully select and showcase the best spaces. This approach gave us complete control over the quality of the content and enabled us to create a polished first impression.
Crowdsourced platforms can become overly noisey. Just because a space receives many views does not mean it is suitable for everyone. A prime example of this is the notorious Blue Lick Road (a hoarder's paradise). Our curated approach wasn't designed to be evergreen, which meant that content could feel outdated if it wasn't refreshed. However, that was acceptable to us. We didn't expect users to visit daily; our goal was to impress them during their first visit and convert them into subscribers.
We also designed a clean, minimal interface to let Matterport spaces shine. On space pages, like the Louvre, we kept things simple so the focus stayed on the content. Since Discover needed to support many industries—from real estate to museums—our layout had to be flexible and unobtrusive.
To enhance the user experience, we chose to enable autoplay for spaces when users first landed on the page. Previously, users needed to click a play button to start the content. Autoplay helped to eliminate this barrier, but it introduced a challenge: users could not scroll while browsing because scrolling action was reserved for zooming in and out of a space. We addressed this issue by ensuring that there is always a scrollable section outside the space viewport, regardless of the screen size.
Privacy and sharing were significant concerns for many Matterport customers, particularly those using the platform for private or internal spaces. We aimed to build trust by ensuring they had complete control over the visibility of their spaces. At that time, the privacy settings were limited to just two options: "Visible" or "Hidden," with the addition of an optional password.
We introduced a clearer model: "Public" for spaces meant to be seen by anyone, "Unlisted" for those that shouldn’t appear on Discover or search engines, and "Private" for completely hidden content. Every space showed its privacy setting, and users could change it easily. To encourage public sharing, we explained the benefits clearly in the UI and in emails to likely contributors.
Search engine optimization was another priority. We wanted users to discover Matterport spaces by searching for things like "virtual museum tour." We partnered with SEO consultants from Good Eggs to strengthen our strategy. This included adding keyword-rich blurbs, linking related spaces, and embedding images to improve visibility.
Finally, we focused on supporting creator identity. Many of our photographers and small businesses didn’t want to manage their own websites. We gave them customizable profile pages where they could showcase work, link to social media, and attract leads. This turned Discover into a lightweight portfolio platform and encouraged creators to share more of their spaces.
Since its launch, Matterport Discover has garnered widespread acclaim from from our customers and our customer's customer. The platform has significantly increased engagement with properties, leading to higher SaaS conversion rates and faster sales cycles. Photographers have reported a notable improvement in the quality of leads generated through Matterport Discover, as users are better informed and more confident in their decision-making process. Overall, Matterport Discover has solidified Matterport's position as a leader in immersive visualization technology for the real estate industry, setting a new standard for online property showcasing.