Esports — Esports experiences for gamers and viewers
Principal Product Design Lead, Microsoft ・ 2019 - 20
Esports was identified as one of the core pieces for growth by engaging the Gen Z gaming community. Based on the trends, the leadership guidance was to create compelling search experiences and a new fan base for Microsoft & Bing. I led design and strategy for the esports segment — building a strong foundation across the major game titles covering 90% of the market, then focusing on unique experiences to carve out a differentiated space.
Understanding Gen Z
I did a deep dive to understand our target users — who they are, what their lifestyle and outlook is, how the world is shifting towards Gen Z, and the upcoming professions.
Fans and viewership
Opportunity areas
Search is a huge space, so we started with identifying bigger themes that would help ground the concepts and ideation in the user’s and business’s best interest.
- 01No single place for esports fans to follow all the action.
- 02No comprehensive search experience for tournaments, teams, players, matches.
- 03Livestream experience focused only on popularity.
- 04Most esports sites focused on a few top games.
Building the foundation
Esports experiences across major game titles
Get updates about your favourite esports
Finding esports information at a dedicated spot was not convenient. Bing took the lead in providing a comprehensive experience for the major titles in esports, covering over 90% of the market. Based on user needs my role was to design these experiences — growing our user base from 0 to 1M+ repeat users through these scenarios.
Find tournaments, matches, teams and players for your favourite game
Unique experiences
Enabling users to find the most engaging livestreams
Bing’s aim was to democratize the streaming ecosystem by allowing streamers to be discovered for more qualities than viewership alone. The existing search on Mixer and Twitch only allowed searching by game and number of viewers, which caused popular streamers to become even more popular while new and upcoming streamers struggled to show up in search results at all.
Microsoft Watch For is an AI system for analyzing live video stream content and surfacing the most interesting parts of a livestream in real time. The team created skills for major esports titles that would identify data points which ultimately enabled the user to search more exciting streams.
Discover new streamers, watch engaging streams and gameplay
Here is an example of Fortnite streams with game phase at the end — games towards the end are generally more exciting in battle royale mode — ranked by the streamer who has the highest number of eliminations.
Bringing personality into the experience by celebrating the gaming character art, colour themes and overall a more immersive and bolder approach. This was a first step to experiment with a different visual for esports users, and the design was really appreciated by the gaming community.
Unique experiences
Streamer profiles with stats, highlights, rank and trends for every streamer in the world
The streamer experience is like a resume for a gamer. Streamers can find their profiles by searching their handle on Bing. The experience packages gamer stats across multiple titles, highlights from their gameplay and their rank. With trends, gamers can see their individual performance over time and compare themselves to pro streamers. Gaming teams are always on the lookout for upcoming talent, so streamers can use this to break out from amateur to professional gaming.
Find stats of your favourite streamers
Watch For enables us to track any streamer on Twitch or Mixer. This gives us the opportunity to create experiences for 100K+ casual streamers.
Check when they are usually online
Bing can now power analytics for casual streamers — Watch For tech enables us to track any streamer on Twitch or Mixer.
See who is on top this week
Rankings surface who is performing right now, rather than who already has the largest audience.
Highlights created by AI
Interesting moments from a livestream are stitched together to create automatic highlights
With AI, a highlight is created automatically from a stream
Livestreams are often very long and sitting through them is not for everyone. A 9 hour livestream can be summarized in a 5 minute highlight video capturing the most interesting and exciting events.
This was a result of the pain points we had collected from user research. We wanted to enable this experience for casual gamers who didn’t have time to create highlights using a video editing tool, as it is time consuming and has a high learning curve. Casual gamers wanted to focus on playing the game and still reap all the benefits of a highlight reel to promote themselves.
The challenge — how to shorten the livestream and still convey the essence of their gameplay and stream.
The solution — after digging deeper, we found that some streamers wanted to focus their highlights on their actions in the game and some wanted to focus on their personality. Keeping the user needs in mind I explored the solutions below, then evangelized the idea with the developers to prototype the feature.
Types of highlights
Various types of highlights can be created from livestreams. I explored and came down to three major types.
