WiFi Direct (WD) is a state of the art technology for a Device-to-Device (D2D) communication in 802.11 networks. The performance of the WD system can be significantly affected by some key factors such as the type of application, specifications of MAC and PHY layer parameters, and surrounding environment etc. It is, therefore, important to develop a system model that takes these factors into account. In this paper, we focus on investigating the design parameters of the PHY layer that could maximize the efficiency of the WD 802.11 system. For this purpose, a basic theoretical model is formulated for a WD network under a 2x2 Multiple In Multiple Out (MIMO) TGn channel B model. The design level parameters such as input symbol rate and antenna spacing, as well as the effects of the environment, are thoroughly examined in terms of path gain, spectral density, outage probability and Packet Error Rate (PER). Thereafter, a novel adaptive algorithm is proposed to choose optimal parameters in accordance with the Quality of Experience (QoE) for a targeted application. The simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the standard method thereby achieving an optimal performance in an adaptive manner.