Timeline: 2022 July- 2022 August (2 Months)
Team: Austin Leung, Hans Yadav, Wesley, Pablo (one designer and three developers)
Tools: Figma, Miro, Notion
StreamETH
Background
During my summer internship @ Livepeer, an open video infrastructure company, I partnered with the Ethereum Foundation to lead the design of creating a live streaming platform for users to stream and watch events at the Devcon conference. There was a lack of options for people to participate in events virtually and an effective platform for speakers to stream centrally. Our goal was to bridge the gap and minimize the friction for speakers and attendees to enjoy the event anywhere around the world.
Read more here: Medium Article
Link to site: StreamETH
Understanding the Problem
With the continuous growth of Devcon, the biggest web3 conference, there is a continuous increase of worldwide presence resulting in many participants not having the chance to attend the event physically as it happens in different places around the world. At Devcon, many events are hosted throughout the week, often overlapping with each other resulting in participants missing important events.
Research
Understanding Other Streaming Platforms: Competitive Analysis
With the abundance of streaming platforms available, I took some time to learn and understand the architecture of already successful streaming platforms. I explored the following streaming platforms to get a better understanding of what is good and bad.
Takeaways
• With the great number of options, frictionless navigation between tasks, such as changing between videos and finding the right videos through filters, is crucial to a good user experience.
• Additional information on streams/videos such as descriptions, labels, and specific categories of videos allows users to easily find what they are looking for and explore.
• Side catalog of videos allows users to effortlessly interchange between videos or follow a schedule of live videos as looking at all videos at once can be overwhelming.
• Additional information on streams/videos such as descriptions, labels, and specific categories of videos allows users to easily find what they are looking for and explore.
• Side catalog of videos allows users to effortlessly interchange between videos or follow a schedule of live videos as looking at all videos at once can be overwhelming.
Understanding the Users
We have three specific users on StreamETH: virtual attendee, organizer, and speaker. I spent time speaking to users who attended previous events at Devcon and collected feedback on their needs. I compiled the feedback from the users and put them into a list of user needs.
Solution
Before I started designing it was important to base the solution on the needs and pain points of our target users that we found. Going over the research and information we gathered, I identified the common themes that could be executed into our features. Categorizing the research and findings I put everything into two main categories.
1. Prioritizing the live events and schedule
The goal of this product was to create a platform that users could seamlessly navigate through, executing the basic needs of a streaming platform. Some of the most important features were to put emphasis on the schedule and live events with the goal of users connecting to the event instantly.
2. Allow personalization and control
Including features that give users a sense of control over what they see is very important. As Devcon holds over 2000 attendees in person and has a large amount of online attendance, there will be a wide range of users with varying interests. By allowing users to have the option of personalization, users will be able to explore their personal interests at Devcon.
Features
Usability
Results
StreamETH was successfully tested and used at the Devcon conference in Columbia reaching approximately 60,000 views throughout the event. Our team received a lot of positive feedback regarding the platform. Most importantly, it gave us a clear signal of the need for this platform. Moving forward, the developers plan to continue building out the rest of the designed features and polish the overall UI before the next event, while continuously retrieving usability feedback from the event.
Key Takeaways
1. Familiar design is good design, many people have interacted with streaming services before and most of them did not want to learn how to navigate through another one as the goal of StreamETH is to onboard users easily and quickly. By designing and following Jakobs law users already have a mental model of this platform, allowing them to quickly begin their goal of participating.
2. Additional usability testing, as time was a constraint for this project, I would have liked to run usability tests, as I had no time for usability testing besides on our internal team. Running the usability tests would help minimize friction and discover pain points that we may have missed.