client: Twitch

role: product designer

duration: june 2016 - august 2019

Users of Twitch are able to showcase their support for their favorite broadcasters and interact and other users using the Twitch Leaderboard.

On the other side of the coin, broadcasters have a desire to understand the insights and motivators of their “top 3”.

Collaborating with the UX research team, we have come to understand these points for two main user groups of Twitch - these are expressed as broadly as possible due to NDA.

- Provide an alternative method of interacting with frequent fans.

- Moderate revenue and interactions with fans.

- Increase Bits purchasers and users.

- Ability to support their favorite broadcasters in a fun and competitive manner.

- Interact and compete with other users for visibility.

- Provide an alternative way of using Bits

For our mini competitive analysis, we mainly looked at other streaming services based in Asian countries as there was strong foundation and market for leaderboards that have pre-existed. There were several striking similarities between how Leaderboards were displayed, such as hiearchy,the amount of users displayed and most of all the incentive for users to be show cased or recognized by the streamer and other users.

First, my mentor advised to look at earlier concepts that were mocked-up before I took on the Leaderboards project. It appeared that we shared the same train of thought where we used some commonly used representations of ranks often seen in competitions. One of the most common representations is a tiered visual, by placing "gold" at the top, followed by "silver" and "bronze" ranked users depending on how much they have cheered.

This project was extremely dynamic in the sense that outside of the main objective of Leaderboards, there were other points such as moderation and maintenance features to consider.

Moderation, maintenance and revenue tracking was mainly focused on the broadcasters' experience.

Since we had a baseline from former wireframes, in order to better understand how interactions would work and potential animations to provide appropriate feedback to those who participate in the leaderboards, I decided to proceed in adding more intricate details in accordance with constraints provided by partnered teams.

Below is an expanded version of the leaderboards.

Since there were automated animations and manual interactions resulting in animations, I looked for a way to help our stakeholders understand what would they expect to see when something happened.

I broke it down to a couple major events that users would anticipate to spectate:

Default State

User becomes #1

User becomes #2

User becomes #3

Dashboards was a new territory for me to explore in terms of UX/UI. Personally, I have interacted with numerous dashboards in different industries, but understanding moderation and revenue from the broadcasters' point of view was extremely pertinent in creating a tool that made sense for them.

After watching numerous video interviews between our UX researchers and the broadcasters, what we have learned was (in no specific order:

They would like some way to control the ambiance/environment of their streams.

A visualization on how to manage their revenue.

A method to contact and thank the viewers who have or have not cheered.

Which videos had the most cheers? Which ones had the most comments/views?

We wanted to meet their needs in a way that our broadcasters are able to see, monitor and interact with these trends.

In terms of art direction, I wanted to make the leaderboards experience as festive as possible without being too distracting from the main focus of streaming which is enjoying the broadcaster's stream.

Leaderboards was eventually put on pause before my departure from Twitch. The last portion I worked on was imagining how Leaderboards would look in a live-setting as seen here. We went through some last critiques about the animations and gathered feedback on whether or not it is distracting from the streaming experience. There was still internal conversations that were occuring, and thus, I had to abandon the project to further focus on launching in-app purchasing.

I checked in about a year after I left Twitch to see if Leaderboards made its appearance. I was happy to see that most of my expanded state concepts went into production. I am curious how the rest of the project went after my departure, but overall I had a very career-centered experience in my short time at Twitch.