Vreal is an immersive content platform that allows gamers to record content and upload for others to watch. For the creator, it’s a vastly different on-boarding experience compared to existing platforms such as YouTube or Twitch. This lead to some challenges in bringing in new creators, which are highlighted in detail below.
Considerations
New creators were recording content and never publishing it to be publicly consumed (only 16% of all new content was being published)
The above data was the only data we had (recordings made vs published) and there were several points of contention where creators could be getting stuck
We were at the tail end of a big marketing push and needed more content on the platform fast
Data gathering
First, I sent out a short survey to our community to find out what blockers they were hitting. It turned out that 50% of the creators were just trying out recording and never had any intention of publishing. However, the results also indicated some other issues to us:
My next step was to gather up all of the feedback we had received from conversations online or at various events we had held. I also did a full pass review of the entire flow from a new user perspective and took notes on issues I came across. In all feedback we’d received, there were two major pain points that were recurring.
Recording
Perception around what the platform was meant to be (creators thought it was a livestreaming service or a VR OBS of sorts)
Audio configuration issues
No way to edit the content once it’s been recorded
Publishing
They didn’t know they were supposed to publish after recording
Email verification was a requirement in order to publish and the flow was clunky and confusing
If they navigated away from the content page while the content was publishing, it would interrupt the publish and sometimes get in a stuck state
Solutions
With all of the information categorized, I put together a proposal with solutions and presented it to stakeholders. The below two items were immediate solutions that the engineers could start on.
The first thing we did was remove email verification. We decided that it wasn’t serving the purpose it was originally intended for so this was a quick and easy thing we could do.
The second thing we did was add a publish progress for creators and tidied up the issues around publish interruptions.
While the engineers worked on those two items, I created a prototype for a quick tutorial for creators (below are a few pages from the prototype).
