Shotcall:
Create a Session
Shotcall is a community management platform to allow creators to connect with their fan base. The company's main product, termed "session(s)", helped creators to host queues, private games, or tournaments to play games with fans or for their communities to play with one another. However, despite the consistent on-boarding of creators (~20 - 30 per week), only 5 would make their first session post-onboard and only 2 would host consistent sessions.
The goal of the project was to lower the barrier to create a session and to encourage recurring session creation for creators. I focused on simplifying the user flow to create a session via template system and to encourage user behaviors for impromptu session creation.
The project duration was 4 months from research to launch, I was the lead UX Designer. I partnered with developers, community managers, a UI designer, and the CTO to ship the product.
Prototyping (Figma)
The Problem:
1) Many creators felt overwhelmed trying to create a session
2) Creators who had a recurring schedule usually duplicated the session and then edited the new session rather than using the session template feature
3) Majority of creators wanted to host sessions spontaneously rather than hosing a recurring session
How did we address it?
1) We recategorized the questions asked per step to lower total cognitive load
2) We highlighted the session template feature in the "Create a Session" flow and introduce "Save as template" option next to "duplicate session" option
3) We introduced the template system at the beginning of "Create a session" to lower time spent in creating a spontaneous session
Recategorizing questions:
During creator interviews, many felt overwhelmed in trying to create a session. The previous method had main steps broken down into: session type + session options, scheduling information, game related settings, and then advanced privacy settings. Although it was just 4 steps, each step had roughly 7 - 8 input items.
Our team took time to unpack the necessity of each question and the context for usage on our platform. We analyzed data points to see which non-required settings were being used the most as well as data from creators card sorting session questions.
Based on the data, I increased the amount of steps to 5 and lowered amount of input per step (5 max). Additionally, I pulled out the question for session type to it's own step to lower cognitive load on the first step of creating a session. We then grouped by session type related questions, game related questions, scheduling, and then advance settings.
By lowering the amount of cognitive load in the first steps and last steps while sanwiching the harder sections in the middle, we were able to increase session creation rates.
Reintroducing the session template feature:
Out of the few creators that regularly used our platform, majority used the "duplicate" feature for a session rather than using our session template feature. We uncovered this user behavior during our initial creator interviews with the business team. This behavior was particularly interesting because I knew the platform already provided methods to save custom templates and to apply the templates during "create a session". Upon digging further into the issues in subsequent user research sessions, creators replied, "[they] had no idea that [session template feature] existed".
Once I took time to look into the UI, I could see why creators missed the feature. It was tucked inside a collapsed accordian UI, which was only available on the first step of "Create a Session". Furthermore, within the UI element, the individual session templates were only distinguishable by name and all had the same icons.
I took the time to explore different visual treatments and focused on improving visual heirarchy for the template feature. In between iterations, I ran internal micro usability tests to help guide design choices. Final live design included having an expanded right side nav for template features and expanding the UI elements for improved information communication.
Additionally, I took included a way to save previous sessions as a template on existing sessions' utility nav. Current user behavior had creators duplicating session from the utility nav. By introducing the "Save as template" option above "Duplicate Session", I was able to integrate new user behavior to replace the previous one.
After the initial launch on our platform, our team noticed an uptick of template feature usage via number of saved templates. I was able to increase the rate of usage in the template feature by increasing the visual heirarchy of the feature and by introducing "Save as template" option to disrupt previous user behavior patterns.
Session template feature popup:
During initial user research, several creators mentioned deciding what to do during streaming usually 30 minutes before streaming. While creators were able to save time with the restructured questions, creators were still spending 10 minutes for session creation, and several minutes upward of 20 minutes if they had a creativity block with coming up with session names or descriptions.
By leveraging a pre-existing feature, I reordered the user flow to include session template as a popup. Combined with on the previous research data about which questions were absolutely necessary to host a session, I found it crucial to only include 6 questions: session type, session title, session time, session description, related game, session size limit. These questions would allow creators to be flexible in their session creation without having to go through the nitty gritty of the creation session
Additionally, by prefilling the template formfields with such as: "Queue with {{creator_alias}}" or "Game with {{creator_alias}}, it lowered overall time spent in session creation.
Through introducing templates at a earlier step in the session creation flow, I was able to lower the average time spent for session creation to 3 - 6 minutes. Additionally I was able to lower number of clicks/input required for session creation from an average of 11 clicks to average of 5 clicks.
Live Feature:
Outcome and Impact:
In order to validate the changes, we tested with a cohort of 20 creators throughout the changes. After the initial launch, we then onboarded 60 creators for 3 weeks and observed for another 3 weeks for session creation rates. From the 60 creators, 30 creators created their first session and 10 started to host regular sessions, with 4 creators intending to start regular sessions.
The session template feature still live in v1 product platform and is projected to be included in the v2 platform launch. Additionally the template feature has been modified to use for another product within v2 and is projected to launch simultaneously with the session template feature.