Twitch is one of the largest gaming streaming platform in the world. The basis of the project was to explore on-screen viewer interactions through the use of extensions. During the research we investigated how this best could be integrated as a new experience, as well as how to best motivate viewers to actively participate.
The final product was concluded with a set of initial design guidelines for Twitch’s further work in the area of extensions.
Exploring viewer interactions.
The team worked in an iterative design process during the course of six months with the mission to find best practices for further advancements in the area of extensions.
For the research, we held extensive user questionnaires, stakeholder interviews and ideated a wide variety of ideas and concepts to be tested. We developed mockups and interactive prototypes to execute the tests, using Sketch and Proto.io.
The initial user research was summarised in personas to encapsulate the defined user groups and cater to their distinct needs.
As extensions as a concept was a rather new mental image for the user, we developed a wide range of concepts to investigate which would be best received by the user groups.
To spark the idea generation, we performed theme based brainstorms around our personas and specific games and topics.
Though these methods, we identified a number of potential areas to be further investigated: gamification, learning, communication, opinions and utility.
These areas formed the base for testing ideas that together created the final concept of Points incentive.
Points Incentive.
The final concept included Points, earned by watching streams and using extensions, in an extension bar.
Extension Interfaces.
Screenshots from the final proof of concept for the Points extension bar, which included extensions for Points Shop, Mini-Games, Betting and Game Tutorial.
Developed concept.
Read more about the final concept of Twitch’s developed Channel Points here.
The video by Twitch that first introduced the new feature can be seen below.