Mixer
Mixer, Xbox’s game streaming service, required a creative & interactive monetization model
Mixer is a cross-platform content streaming service where live broadcasters entertain viewers across the world. Viewers and streamers interact with one another by way of traditional text chat, free Mixer Skills (purchased with Sparks) and premium Mixer Skills (purchased with Embers). Users collect Sparks by time watching streams while Embers are purchased with money. A large percentage of the money spent on a premium skill goes directly to the streamer. A skill is essentially a glorified form of a monetary donation.
Users donate to get noticed by the streamer and by others in chat. Viewers should be rewarded for spending more. My task was to define what this reward system looked like and how it behaved during a stream.
Project
Product design
Year
2019
Mixer is a cross-platform content streaming service where live broadcasters entertain viewers across the world. Viewers and streamers interact with one another by way of traditional text chat, free Mixer Skills (purchased with Sparks) and premium Mixer Skills (purchased with Embers). Users collect Sparks by time watching streams while Embers are purchased with money. A large percentage of the money spent on a premium skill goes directly to the streamer. A skill is essentially a glorified form of a monetary donation.
Users donate to get noticed by the streamer and by others in chat. Viewers should be rewarded for spending more. My task was to define what this reward system looked like and how it behaved during a stream.
We landed on the 1st direction in order to leverage the Ember pink. The tiers were also most different at a glance. Lastly for accessibility, we didn’t want to rely on color alone when establishing a differentiation. I created a system of guidelines to communicate with developers and across the Mixer team.
The second way to incentivize users and elevate premium attributions was by allowing them to include publicly shared custom messages. These comments would live within their stylized attributions.
The plan is to A/B test the way pinned messages dismiss. The more direct route in teaching viewers that one pinned message has longer shelf life than another is by showing a timer with each message slowly tick down. That can be seen in the first route.
There’s a certain degree of finesse in only showing the final 10 seconds or so of a countdown as seen in the second animation. It also feels less intrusive and distracting.
