POPDOG

Platform for gaming creators' to truly own their community, live healthier lives, and grow their loyal fanbase.

Empowering gaming creators

Popdog was founded by some well-known esports legends and founders passionate about gaming content creation. We originally started out building a product to help smaller gaming creators across multiple platform with discoverability but eventually pivoted to community building and ownership for those creators. We had deep insight and competitive edge due to us also working closely with Loaded, the leading talent management firm that represent the top creators on Twitch, Youtube, and Facebook Gaming.

Summary

 As one of the first designer brought on to help build a product alongside my fellow colleague from Wonder, we established the foundations of the product design at the company. We created a design system leveraging Figma, set up internal user testing labs, and processes to integrate with the existing engineering and product team. We successfully launched a cross-platform discovery product that allowed viewers to easily find and organize all of their favorite channels across Twitch, Youtube, and Mixer. Due to market shifts, we pivoted at the beginning of 2021 to address an issue we were seeing for creators. This lead to a restart on the product in many ways and forced us into a super-lean and hyper-focused gear to build a creator-focused profile that would allow them to generate true fan acquisition that could convert into passive monetary gains.

Product Team: Scott Hernandez, Justin Malara, Andreas Thorstensson, Doug Millet, Lance Miles, Micah Baldwin

Services
  • Wrote test scripts and conducted user testing
  • Quantitative Analysis for User Testing
  • UI Design - Mobile and Desktop Web Interfaces
  • High-fidelity prototypes for innovative experiences
  • Marketing Website designs
  • Onboarding Strategy
  • Figma Design System Construction
  • User Flows, System Mapping & Wireframes
  • Introduced and facilitated Agile methodologies and strategies to the product team

Strategy & Goals

  • Execute on user-testing plan and strategy within design team
  • Select design software and create a design system for engineers, designers, and product designers to reference
  • Improve designs based on testing feedback and analysis
  • Strategies ways to increase efficiency and delivery of product features by creating smooth handoff and collaboration practices with engineering

Figma Design System

With the new updates to Figma at the time of myself and my design partner's start date at Popdog, we came in knowing we would choose this software as our primary design tool. It helped reduce the need for Invision, Zeplin, Abstract, and Sketch. It helped us communicate and collaborate real-time with engineering and product leadership. Our design system made sure to have our highly-polished branding integrated into it, as our product was consumer-facing. We also made light and dark mode for everything as we discovered it to be the most wanted feature from our users.

Base
Primary
Dark Persian Red
‍#C91E1E
RGB: 201, 30, 30
Persian Red
‍#E33429
RGB: 227, 52, 41
Popdog Red
‍#F84443
RGB: 0, 73, 97
Salmon
‍#FF6157
RGB: 255, 97, 87
Cosmos
‍#FF9182
RGB: 255, 146, 130
Secondary / Support
Royal Blue
‍#074EA1
RGB: 7, 78, 161
Deep Blue
‍‍#E33429
RGB: 32, 98, 225
Atlantic Blue
‍#3A86F9
RGB: 58, 134, 249
Pacific Blue
‍#4E9FFF
RGB: 78, 159, 255
Baby Blue
‍#A8D0FF
RGB: 168, 208, 255
Affirmitive
Jungle Green
‍#05805B
RGB: 5, 128, 91
Seaweed Green
‍‍‍#0BA95D
RGB: 11, 169, 93
Leafy Green
#29CF4E
‍RGB: 41, 207, 78
Atlantis
#59E55F
RGB: 89, 229, 95
Mint
‍‍#ACF2AF
RGB: 172, 242, 175
Special
Caramel
‍‍#A9500F
RGB: 169, 80, 15
Mango
‍‍‍‍#ED8409
RGB: 237, 132, 9
Citrus
‍#FFAF13
‍RGB: 255, 175, 19
Tan Hide
‍#FFD541
RGB: 255, 213, 65
Eggnog
‍‍#FFEAA0
RGB: 255, 234, 160
Error / Negative
Cherry Red
‍#A01637
RGB: 160, 22, 55
Dark Error Red
‍‍‍‍‍#BF1C43
RGB: 191, 28, 67
Error Red
‍#E92A5B
‍RGB: 233, 42, 91
Bright Red
‍‍#ED5579
RGB: 237, 85, 121
Light Error Red
‍‍‍#FFAABF
RGB: 255, 170, 191

Popdog Discovery

Our initial goal was to help lesser-known streamers get discovered in a market that was completely engulfed by Twitch. At the time when team was building out Popdog, Microsoft created a competitor called Mixer, Facebook created Facebook Gaming, and Youtube was pouring more resources in the live-streaming space for gaming content. We created a platform that would aggregate all of the live-stream channels across this fracturing market and create ways for viewers to easily find content creators based on a multitude of searching or browsing criteria. Along the way, we wanted to provide a premium user-experience in areas that were being neglected on these platforms. In addition, we created a way for users to organize their favorite channels into collections, similar to the way you would create playlist on a music app.

Creator-first approach

Due to some unforeseen circumstances, market changes and company vision shifting, we pivoted away from this initial product to become more creator-focused. We hit the reset button and went back to the drawing board on sitemap, personas, user-flows. We had a lot of features that were already in progress that still fit within our previous vision and with all of the knowledge we had gained from user behavior study and feedback, we quickly launched a new product within a couple months. Our main goal was to create deeper connections for creators and their true fans, rather than the passer-by audience members. We eventually wanted to capture this loyal fanbase by creating features that would allow creators to monetize directly and for fans to get access to exclusive experiences.

Algorithmic stream highlighter

Our latest feature launch was a native video player that would algorithmically determine the best moments within a live-stream based on chat sentiment and activity. We could analyze keywords and synonyms used by audience members and clip content that was either funny or exciting, or as we like to say "Hyped". This was just the foundational piece for more to come around community engagement.

Contact for Details
WONDER