Schedule

Adding creator schedules to Twitch

Leave it to us; we just might forget

Our creators enamor and bring joy to their viewers; they create an energy that builds upon each stream. As a broadcast inevitably comes to an end, their community figures out how to catch the next time around.

Whether it’s due to FOMO, the excitement of being surprised by something funny as it happens, or the warm feeling of being a part of a community, watching live just feels more exciting.

Role

Lead UX designer

Outcome

Designed and shipped feature to millions of creators

Starting with what we know

The question we asked ourselves—what can we build to help facilitate viewers catching their favorite creators while they’re live?

Following, in a major way, solves for this. The feature is a platform- and service-agnostic concept. The ubiquitous “I Tap, I See More” button. However, in a live context, it leaves much up to chance:

How Twitch does following:

  • Makes them easier to find in global navigation and discovery surfaces.
  • It turns on push notifications when they go live.

🤞 Chance is... they’ll be live when you arrive.

🤳 Chance is... you’re free when you get the notification.

But even if a creator streamed 6 hours a day, there’s a 75% chance (😏) they’d be offline on arrival per diem. And because our phones go everywhere with us, there’s an even more epic chance a viewer is more ready to [insert life event] than open up a live stream when that notification comes in.

So, when serendipity fails us, streams are missed.

A lesson in creating opportunities

Twitch has the present, live video, locked in. I watched us go through a couple investments and divestments into the recent past, through (colloquially) VOD’s and Clips. How would we solve for the creators’ and viewers’ future?

2 days agoLIVE???

The benefit of supporting such brilliant creatives on Twitch is that we get to constantly learn from them. Before we even get to capturing an opportunity, there’s a good chance they’re already seeking ways to address it.

So, with this goal in mind, how could we learn from our creators? How they were getting their community to show up?

Thus, I looked to what our top creators were doing.

Using DevTools to capture hundreds of channel pages

The evidence became quantifiable. Our top creators were using a freeform space called their “Panels” to communicate when they’d be streaming. These sit neatly below their video player while they’re live.

The problem is that it’s really hard to take inconsistent, unstructured data and make use of it beyond that specific placement.

Many creators use the freeform “Panel” space below their stream to let their community when they plan to be live.

This freeform space had its issues in discoverability, as well as the difficulty in scaling it to other surfaces.

At this point, it made sense to focus on what was immediately ahead of us: we got the green light to build our own version of the creator schedule.

Thinking about the opportunity space

Seeking inspiration is where the real fun starts. Given the oft-discussed nature of visualizing time, I wasn’t shy with my sources: across text books, poster design, software design, and calendars, I consumed everything I could get my hands on.

Many sources have been lost to time. Links were saved but don’t appear to work anymore.