Streaming support extension | UX UI Bootcamp final project with Ironhack

Streaming support extension | UX UI Bootcamp final project with Ironhack

Role: UX UI Designer, Timeline: 2 weeks, Deliverables: Twitch extension design and prototype

Rare games is a game development studio based in England. For 36 years they have been deeply involved in titles that helped shape gaming culture, with titles such as Donkey Kong Country and the Iconic GoldenEye. Sea of thieves is one of their most recent tiles making a splash in the gaming industry. It is a unique sandbox game where players are free to roam the map as pirates taking on challenges from the deep, non-player characters, the environment and even other players . It is truly a unique experience with a seemingly endless offering of adventures to be had.

When we approached Xander Ashwell, Director of UX at Rare with the goal to develop a solution for the game. He informed us that in today’s climate, content creators and streamers are crucial for the continued success of a title by maintaining relevance to audiences old and new. We had a meeting with him to get to know the company better, outline their goals and get a sense of what problems we needed to address.

Our design journey started when we received 2 briefs from our stakeholder.

“Our research shows that players who play with their friends tend to remain engaged for longer, both within individual play sessions and for the lifetime of their engagement. How can we support players in finding friends to crew up with and sail the seas together? How can we strengthen this social aspect of the title outside of the gameplay experience? Look to existing methods of matchmaking and social play, whether within the existing ecosystem (Xbox Live, Steam, etc), in competitor products within gaming or further afield, outside of the gaming space. Help players find more suitable crew-mates, smooth out the friction in sailing together, or innovate in as yet unexplored directions….”

“Our research points to streamers being an important fulcrum point in maintaining relevancy and share of voice in the saturated gaming market. What opportunities are there to better support streamers in sharing their incredible experiences on the Sea of Thieves? How can we leverage second screen experiences, support more autonomy for streamers, bring their audiences into the title, and engender collaborative play?”

The team liked both of these so it was a tough choice but we decided to focus more on brief 2. I suggested that we keep our options open at this stage however, the thinking was that it would be advantageous to have the freedom to roam conceptually early on. This allowed us the freedom to try and think of ways we could try to address both of these at once, and although this was just a best case scenario at this point, we saw later that it was the right call.

Our stakeholder interview with Xander was very enlightening and we came away with a lot of confidence from asking the right questions and having an effective dialogue. We started by getting more context around the briefs to make sure we fully understood the end goal of either solution. We then clarified the demographic of their users to get an idea of who to design for. Sea of thieves is a rated 12+ and their main demographic is males aged 18–35 with the highest concentration being in the US, followed by the EU and emerging markets.

In this case, Rare had already done all of the relevant research on their players and made the conscious decision to make the game as accessible to different groups as possible. Because of this, and some advice given by our stakeholder we decided to focus more on finding opportunities to help the current player and streamer base improve their experience instead of defining a specific user and designing for them.

He told us what would be feasible relating to integrations with the games matchmaking and twitch. He also let us know that it was of utmost importance that any solutions have no effect on the experience in-game, not giving streamers or viewers any advantages or disadvantages as side-effects of using the tool. This was to maintain fairness across the board.

Our external research started at the finish line. We tuned into streams, entered community groups and Discord chat servers to seek out potential participants ion our study of players, streamers and their communities. We sent out a survey in English and German to capture quantitative information on how stream viewers interacted with the game, focusing especially on the impact that streamers have on their engagement with the game. The results below clearly suggest that streamers can have an immense effect on their audience. We wanted to go deeper into this and find out the reasons for this.

Interviews and surveys

We secured interviews with a broad selection of streamers at different stages of their streaming careers and varying levels of involvement with the Sea of thieves community, as well as viewers from some of their communities. From these qualitative interviews it became apparent that the game itself was a bridge, connecting people with a passion for the same streamer, the love of adventure and a sense of community. The freedoms granted to players has helped create spaces where streamers can spread positivity and encouragement and viewers can socialise with like-minded people who are into the same game as them and in some cases going through similar life struggles together. One streamer mentioned that he focused on making his stream community a safe space to play games, have fun and talk freely about mental health issues. Not in a sense to hide from it but to have a place to be while they wait out the storm.

Qualitative research

It was clear at this point that whatever our solution was, it could possibly have an immense impact on the player base if executed properly. We needed to find a way to bring these communities even closer together while improving the streamers content, and this was becoming a more exciting possibility as we rounded off the initial research phase and started moving on to developing the tools to do this.

We now needed to define the user journey for our streamer and our viewer. Condensing the qualitative and quantitative data we had collected into 2 user journeys we identified 2 points where streamers and viewers would see a dip in motivation and engagement. Due to the gameplay mechanic of sailing from island to island, there are often times where a streamer will be sailing and find themselves with little to talk to their viewers about. If nothing is happening, viewer engagement drops and this in turn leads to the streamer experiencing negative feelings which effects the quality and energy of the stream and so on and so forth. It becomes a feedback loop where it is on the streamer to pick up the energy before their viewers leave the stream.

Streamer user journey

This Jobs to be done framework condensed these user flows into a set of tasks for our solution to complete, taking into consideration the needs of our streamers and their audience and turning them into actionable elements.

We started ideating and quickly ran into the issue of finding a focus. We were given the briefs with a very wide scope meaning we had the opportunity to make anything that fit the business requirements. At this stage we came up with all kinds of ideas from a cheerleading feature to encourage players and streamers who had hit a wall, to a journal of past streams where players can rewatch notable moments from past streams in an interactive scrapbook.

At this stage, we consulted the stakeholder and showed them our ideas. With his guidance, we reassessed the impact that each idea could have and how unique to Sea of thieves each one could be made. In the end, we decided to create a twitch extension allowing a streamer to set in-game challenges to their viewers while they’re playing. The players participating in the challenge would be matched with other members of the streamers community to compete in the challenge against the streamer for a place on the leaderboard. This solution makes sure that gameplay is fundamentally unchanged, it allows players to potentially make new friends in game who are part of the community and allows the streamer and the audience to interact more closely, even though they can’t guarantee they will be playing on the same server.

We took this idea and ran with it, drawing up initial wireframes and concept testing them with more community members and streamers.

The concept test yielded positive results and feedback on the interface and possible flows helped us iterate this into our first Mid-fi prototype. We added multiple features including a functionality to chat with other players in the waiting room of a challenge, switch teams and lock teams when each member is happy with their crew-mates. We also added a timer and a leaderboard to give users an easy way to scan their progress and keep track of time.

We jumped on the test train once more to gather feedback on this iteration and got even more excellent feedback to improve the extension.

A major selling point of Sea of Thieves is its distinctive and unique style. In one of our interviews with Xander he mentions that one of their core design principles is to not have any straight lines or use gradients. Everything should look unique and well used, while not looking hyper-realistic or too cartoonish. It’s a delicate balance that they’ve struck and we wanted the Twitch extension to melt into this design system dubbed “pirate material” by their design team. To achieve this we downloaded what assets and components we could from the Sea of Thieves website and forum. What we could not repurpose, we modified to fit our needs. An example of this is the trophy icon below, which I made from an existing tankard icon in Figma. We wanted to enhance the stream experience on both ends by making the extension feel like a part of the game screen, helping increase immersion and engagement in-game. We chose to use Manuskript antiqua as the typeface to keep in line with the pirate theme.

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It was an honour to work with Sea of Thieves as Junior Designers. Conversations with our stakeholder Xander were always fruitful as well as all of our interviews with the dedicated members of the game’s community. With our extension we would hope to create a link between the community and the streamers in a game where they could not otherwise play together due to server restrictions. We also hope it can strengthen their content and communities, motivating viewers to team up with each other and share experiences.

Lastly I want to mention that with more time and resources we would certainly look into:

Making a version of the extension to be available on the Streamer’s Manager tab.

Expanding the map so that it can be moved in all directions to find more varied challenges.

Find a way to integrate Sea of Thieves achievements / titles / daily deeds into the challenges.

Thank you for taking the time to read this case study, feel free to leave any feedback and check out my other case studies for more of my work.