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Back-
ground
What is Bright?
Bright is an all-in-one platform for Creators, Influencers, and Teachers to host ticketed, live learning sessions with their fans.
What are Sessions?
The Sessions Experience is the interactive video conference platform that allows audience members to ask questions and allows hosts to invite multiple people to participate “on stage.”
Meta-data
Team
Design Lead (me)
1 IC Designer
1 PM
1 Researcher
7 Engineers
Timeline
MVP Skin: <2 months
V1: ~5 months
Status
Upon joining the company, the MVP of Sessions was designed and agreed upon.
We just needed to apply new branding.
Part 1
The MVP
April 2021
The User Problem
Hosts:
As a Creator hosting a Session on Bright, I want to be able to lead an interactive and engaging session without being distracted by controls or tripped up by technical difficulties.
Audiences:
As a paying attendee of a Bright Session, I want to have a unique, engaging, and intimate experience with a Creator I admire that feels worth my time and money.
The Business Challenge
As a new company, we want to launch with a product just slick enough to give our users a good experience but invest a minimal amount of build that allows us the resources to learn from running live sessions and iterate based on what we learn.
Getting Started
When I joined, Bright was near complete on the MVP of their Sessions product, and mid-way through branding with an outside agency.
The Design department was not involved in this branding effort and was only focused on the product.
We were soon delivered a partially-complete branding system that wasn’t optimized for a digital product, and not ready for digital implementation.
The logo didn’t read well at small scales and the colors felt a bit childlike.
I updated the logo to improve legibility, updated colors based on the agency’s foundational thinking which was quite solid, and cranked out just enough guidelines to use to design the MVP of our Discovery & Booking site.
With a very limited brand, the loss of our Design Director, and an extremely strict timeline (<2 months), we re-skinned the app and launched the MVP.
I may have been able to sway the team into sneaking in a few UX improvements as well...
Improvements Added
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Countdown to start session
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Ability to clear stage
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Encouraging empty states
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Welcome to stage + unmute
Remaining Issues
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Creator X and Participant X were still the same
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Q&C with video attached was a new pattern, and not intuitive
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Very little education
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Muting issues
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No ability to delete one’s own comment
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No speaking indicator
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No full screen
Part 2
Creating a True V1
December 2021
Learnings from the MVP
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Participants wanted to to submit questions and still communicate
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Creators had a hard time identifying which questions to answer and who to engage with
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Creators wanted quick feedback from the audience
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People wanted to share out their session
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There was a fair amount of surprise and confusion around being brought to stage
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Some Creators accidentally started or ended their session
Time to Brainstorm
We held two brainstorms with the entire team: CEO, PM, Research, Designers, Engineers, and the Talent team. It was important to establish co-ownership and to make sure all expertise was represented and exchanged to the extent possible.
We synthesized ideas according to votes and user needs...
...and scoped out which features we should prioritize against company focus areas.
Chosen features in prioritized order
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Separate Questions & Comments
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Allow Creators to chat and share links
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Upvoting of questions
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Show Creators and Audiences more faces at once
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Add moderator messaging for Creators
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Add time counter
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Clarify the bring-to-stage flow for everyone
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Clarify start/stop session for Creators
Exploring the Creator Experience
Exploring the Participant Experience
Chosen Design: Creator X
Chosen Design: Participant X
What we were feeling:
What we were in for:
3 months and countless hours into the project, the CEO suddenly started to question the entire idea of splitting video from questions, which the entire new experience had been built on.
Every big project tends to have an equally big, fun, aha moment.
We had arrived at ours.
The Learning
Even when keeping stakeholders informed, signing off every step of the way, and documenting decisions, things can still happen.
Make sure to communicate implications of decisions as they happen, stay flexible, and never fall too in love with your ideas.
Part 3
Compromise
After a fair amount of conversation with the CEO, Tech lead, and VP of Eng, we decided to move forward with a few of the newly designed updates while a small team would create a prototype to test the split of video and questions outside of the live product.
The Desktop App
We ended up keeping video connected with comments, but were able to move forward with:
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Exploring a lighter feel
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Creating the right nav (only one panel at a time for now)
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Simplifying user controls
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UI styling updates to Q&C
The Mobile App
On Mobile we focused on making sure all features were accessible while keeping the stage in view.
Wrapping
Up
Though we’d decided to parallel the compromised design with the experimental prototype, the company decided that having an app built on Zoom was posing too high a risk to the company’s success.
Engineering refocused all efforts to building out a web-based experience (using the updated design at least) before considering the prototype.
Learnings
This project definitely tested us towards the end, but you can always find something to dance about right? In this instance, I learned that diving into execution mode can make it really difficult to also stay focused on the bigger picture and strategy, and that as difficult as it may be, both parts of the project need equal effort.
There is always room for process improvements, especially at a remote company. Schedule checkins with other leadership and frequent QA syncs. Stay flexible and open and remember people comprehend at different speeds.
Make sure, aside from getting and documenting decisions from leadership, to always be clear in laying out what those decisions mean for the team as they’re being made.
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