Twitch Guilds
Increase employee engagement

The Challenge

At Twitch, there are many employee-initiated groups called "Guilds" that bring employees together based on shared interests, backgrounds, or demographics.

After the Twitch Life platform was launched, the HR team wanted to incorporate Guilds onto the platform to drive employee engagement.

Role

Product designer working alongside stakeholders and engineers

Time

2018

Digging deep into research


Learning from the employees


Although I had some ideas how groups work at Twitch, I knew I didn’t have all the answers. So I went to the people who did. I first identified that there were three types of users: group leaders, general employees, and HR. I conducted interviews with each user type separately to understand how they interacted with their groups and what are their goals and pain points.


At the time, Twitch employees lacked a streamlined means of organizing, managing or publicizing social groups and activities. In order to remain active, group leaders had to be creative and resourceful with existing technology: (1) communications relied on corporate emails and Slack, (2) group invitations relied on Google Sheets and Google Calendar, and (3) event costs relied on collecting via Venmo. Meanwhile, many employees and HR representatives couldn't receive information from groups they were not in.

Defining the problem


All the feedback were organized into an affinity map and shared with the product team so that everyone working on the new features could hear directly from the people who would use it.

Each user type has different needs, goals, and pain points:


Group leaders:

  • User story: I want to facilitate group activities and communication so that I can promote topics that I care about.
  • Pain point: I have to use different tools to facilitate group activities.

    • General employees:

  • User story: I want to explore different groups and events so that I can connect with like-minded people within the company.
  • Pain point: I don't know what's going on with other groups and their events.

    • HR managers:

  • User story: I want to monitor group performance so that I know when to provide support to help improve the overall employee experience.
  • Pain point: I can't monitor the performance of each group.

    • My challenge here was not only to design a product that meets these user needs but also to solve each users' pain points.



    Project Timeline

    Ideate


    How might we make Twitch Guilds a cohesive experience for every employees?


    I listed out features on Asana and discussed with the product manager and engineers to prioritize these features. For each of them we considered:


  • How effective is it against the user story that we originally set out?
  • What’s the effort to build this?
  • What’s the level of change necessary to our existing product?

    • Due to limited resources, we decided to launch the product in two phases. In phase one, we would launch all the must-have features. For features that are more complex, we will release them in phase two.

    I created an information architecture to organize and structure new features in an effective way.

    Designing new features within the Twitch Life platform required brainstorming not only the design but how we introduce the new flows.


    Design


    High fidelity wireframe

    Analytics Tab for Group Leaders

    Test and iterate


    Removing the barrier for group leaders


    After we released the must-have features to Twitch employees, only a few groups and events were created. I looked into the user behavior data on Mixpanel and found out that there were many users started to create a group but dropped out halfway. I talked to some group leaders to understand why. The biggest barrier was that group leaders had to invite members one by one and it was time-consuming.


    I came up two solutions and discussed with the product team:

  • Add an excel upload function for group leaders
  • Get a list of members from all existing groups and create the groups from them

    • We decided to create the groups for them because we believed the function would only be used once and because of a special situation at Twitch: each employee has two company emails (justin.tv & twitch.tv) and the email lists group leaders had included email addresses that won't be recongnized by the platform.



    Reducing steps to browse and sign up for group events


    From the usability tests, users didn't get immediately where to find group events. So I revised the design from one-column layout to two-column layout with upcoming events showing up on the side. I believed this would increase discoverability for group events.

    ×

    Results


    A key lesson to take away from this project is:

    When creating a two-sided market, you need to focus on the supply side first.

    In this case, group leaders play an important role in the success of Twitch Guilds. Group leaders not only are the suppliers to create groups and events for employees to participate but also are the influencers who will get more people onto the platform. After we removed the barrier for the group leaders to use the Guilds features, we saw an increase in engagement for groups and the Twitch Life platform as a whole.