ESPORTS
Esports experiences for Gamers and Viewers
OVERVIEW
Esports was identified as one of the core pieces for growth by engaging the GenZ gaming community. Esports is exploding today and will have more viewers than NBA, MLB, NHL by 2021. Based on the trends the leadership guidance was to create compelling search experiences and a new fan base for Microsoft & Bing. I lead design and strategy for the esports segment for Bing. My role was to build a strong foundation and envision unique user experiences for the segment. During this journey partnerted with multiple Microsoft teams for the experiences, and evangalized our team work with other product groups in Microsoft. We started by creating a good foundation of search experiences for major esports game titles, which will cover 90% of the market share and then focus on unique experiences to carve out a differntiated space.
ROLE
Principal Product Design Lead, Microsoft ・ 2019 - 20
Product Design ・ Vision & Strategy ・ Executive reviews ・ Fostering relationships between partner teams
Understanding GenZ
I did a deep dive to understand our target users — who are they, what is their lifestyle & outlook, 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 user’s and businesses best interest.
01 — No single place for esports fans to follow all the action.
02 — No Comprehensive search experience for tournaments, teams, players, matches.
03 — Livestream experience focused only on popularity.
04 — Most esports sites focused on 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 is not convinient today. 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. Was able to grow our user base from 0 to 1M+ repeat users through these scenarios.
Find Tournaments, Matches, Teams, Players for your favorite 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 allows searching by game and number of viewers, this causes popular streamers to become even more popular while new and upcoming streamers struggle 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 in the end (games towards the end are generally more exciting in battle royale mode) and ranked by the streamer who has highest number of Eliminations.
Bringing personality into the experience by celebrating the gaming character art, color themes and overall an immersive and bolder approach. This was a first step to experiment a different visual for esports users. 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/streamer. Streamers can find their profiles by searching their handle on Bing.com. 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, also compare themselves to the Pro streamers. Gaming teams are always on the lookout for upcoming talent to scout new players. Streamers can use this to breakout from amateur to professional gaming.
Find stats of your fav streamers
WatchFor enables us to track any streamer on Twitch or Mixer. This gives us opportunity to create experiences for 100K+ casual streamers (anyone who is an active streamer on Twitch/Mixer will get this experience)
Check when they are usually online
Bing can now power analytics for casual streamers, WatchFor tech enables us to track any streamer on Twitch or Mixer. Bing can now power analytics for casual.
See who is on the top this week
WatchFor enables us to track any streamer on Twitch or Mixer. This gives us opportunity to create experiences for 100K+ casual streamers (anyone who is an active streamer on Twitch/Mixer will get this experience)
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 in the livestream.
This was a result of the pain points we had collected from our user research as to what would enable them to get more visibility. 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 had a high learning curve. Casual gamers wanted to focus on playing the game and still reeling all the benefits of a highlight reel to promote them.
THE CHALLENGE
The challenge was how to shorten the livestream and still drive the essence of their gmeplay and stream.
THE SOLUTION
After digging a bit deeper, found out that some streamers wanted to focus their highlights on their actions in their game and some wanted to focus on their personality. Keeping in mind of the user needs explored below solutions and then evangalized the idea with the developers to prototype this feature. How interesting events are captured with their time stamps and collated to form a Highlight reel
Types of Highlights
Various types of highlights can be created from the livestreams. Explored and came down to 3 major types of highlights.
