Azubu was a live video broadcasting service focused on professional eSports players, where only Azubu partnered professional players could stream.
As part of the Azubu Vancouver UX/UI satellite office I worked with the product team to discover and introduce new features and enhancements through exploration and iteration. We had the goal of improving both the viewing and streaming aspects for all members and introducing new avenues of engagement to build out the Azubu platform. I worked closely with management, marketing, and the graphic design team to ensure my UX/UI designs were on course and targeting our audience
Goals
Deliver Key Performance Indicators provided by leadership on an ongoing basis
Introduce existing UX team to contemporary tools such as Sketch and Zeplin (and techniques to leverage them effectively)
Advocate for increased user testing and user success analysis
Make it easier and faster for Azubu members to engage with content they enjoy
Explore alterations to the existing service to improve overall user experience
Provide streamers with unique tools to engage with their audience
Analyze existing platform, collect feedback, analyze information architecture and user journeys, and make recommendations to enhance usability
Deliver clear and comprehensive design mockups for satellite development teams in the USA and Ukraine
Provide continued support and availability to technical teams and others to facilitate development and achieving goals
Approach
When necessary be available early morning and late at night for the development team in Ukraine to gain clarity (the USA team and I were in the same time zone).
Take time to express the virtues of contemporary design software such as Sketch for UX/UI design and Zeplin for sharing mockups with developers and quality assurance teams. Additionally, I provided guidance on the benefits of grids, scalable design systems, and building affordances right into the experience as standard
Work closely with leadership to rapidly wireframe and mockup concepts, so the product team could determine which ideas to pursue
Encourage user testing, use of analytics, user interviews, feedback collection (beyond app store reviews) to foster a user centered design approach
Research existing Azubu member experience through requesting feedback through the website and discussing platform needs with Azubu streaming partners. Additionally, worked with community managers to get a sense of community needs
Work with the team to identify areas for potential enhancement, using flowcharts and very basic wireframes to communicate ideas (while working on new engagement features)
Use Dropbox, Gmail, Skype, and Slack to communicate with remote teams and to provide documentation to developers and quality assurance team
Leverage existing mental models and design structures to help inform design decisions
Azubu Apple Watch
Apple watch specs
Azubu Streaming Guide
The streaming guide was intended to enable the visualization of the Azubu streaming schedule. Ideally, this would help surface tournaments as they played out, popular games, and great streams to check out. This was designed to scale from phones to TV's.
Streaming guide (UI animations)
The goal was to pull keyframes from the stream and use them as preview images in the upper container to assist in getting a sense of the stream before jumping in. Additionally, if the UI was idle this would add a little life to it.
Streaming guide specs
Outcome
Azubu and their competitor Hitbox merged in 2017 which resulted in the Vancouver office being closed. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to see many of our planned enhancements and products pushed forward as a result of this. However, it was really beneficial to be able to explore ideas with various members of the company and iterate on tools like the Streaming guide. It was also pretty great to get a glimpse into the exciting world of eSports.
