Role:
Design Lead + Strategist (0-1 product)
Problem / Opportunity:
Content is an increasingly important part of player engagement. Impact analysis by our data team showed that media consumption drove increases in gameplay, retention, and lifetime value. However, despite generating 160M clips every month, we’re seeing low engagement on that content.
Scope:
Drew up strategy and designed the resulting content editor and viewing experience creating a self-sustaining content ecosystem.
Contributions:
Feature Design — Mobile Clip Editor
Feature Design — Web Watch & Play
Total number of posts increased +68% Year/Year (YOY).
Captured 40% of existing share volume with link shares (target 20%)
Collaborators:
Miles Anderson, Michael Khailian, Joe Wheeler
Content is an increasingly important part of player engagement. Impact analysis by our data team showed that media consumption drove increases in gameplay, retention, and lifetime value. However, despite generating 160M clips every month, we’re seeing low engagement on that content.
We found out clip engagement is low due to the lack of creation tools. Xbox didn’t currently have any pathway to creating higher quality content from the console.
We needed to make content creation more compelling.
Our strategy involved integrating key features that worked together in tandem to create a flywheel that works into itself in creating a self-sustaining content ecosystem.
Players wanted the bar to be lower for producing great content, wanted easier ways to share that content externally, and lastly for us to help inspire their friends to join in and play together.
What we proposed was approved by the leadership team and work began to fund 2 features to put plans into motion.
Xbox Mobile Editor
Web Watch & Play
Xbox Mobile Editor
An important piece of landing our UGC Media strategy is to give our users more ways to customize their content and express themselves. We believe this will not only make the act of creation more fun, it will increase the quality of the content that is created and lead to increased viewership and engagement of the content downstream, which fuels the social incentive loop to create more content.
Currently, clips captured on the console go to a shared media library with the Xbox Mobile app. The goal was to position the Mobile app as the best place to trim Xbox clips. For launch, the most important priority was to get the core trim feature right. Though the feature seemed straight forward on the surface, the process that we went through was anything but that.
Watch & Play
Web Watch & Play is an endpoint that targets people who aren’t necessarily Xbox customers yet. From the Xbox Mobile App, players can generate web links to their clips so that anyone can view them regardless of whether or not they are signed in.
Testimony:
You're responsive when questions come up (whether existing designs require clarification or there are new edge cases that we hadn't considered), and you're receptive to feedback when other people have thoughts on how else something could be done - as a dev, it's such a valuable thing to have that sort of relationship with design where we can take learnings as things come up during the development process and work together to iterate on what we're building to be able to deliver the best product that we can to our users, and you do a great job of being open to that sort of feedback - it's much appreciated! - Mark Talley, Senior Software Engineer
Testimony:
Jimmy, loving the work we've done together on media sharing. Can't wait for it to ship, it's just the start of something beautiful. Your work is great, I'd love how collaborative you are, you take feedback really well. The media sharing work done has teed-up the conversation perfectly, and you've positioned well for a great collaboration between the teams (community, Xcloud and design). - Joe Wheeler, Creative Director