Chat is the heartbeat of the Twitch experience and fosters a sense of connection between the streamer and viewer. In my 7+ year tenure at Twitch I worked on various features to make Twitch Chat to usable, safe, accessible and optimized. The following are some key examples of the features I launched in the chat experience.
Twitch chat has long been the connective tissue between community building on Twitch and is one of the most valuable features to help users foster relationships with each other. As a designer in Twitch's Community Organization, there were multiple opportunities to add new and exciting features to chat, whether they were completely novel or improving the product to bring it up to industry standards. I worked on the following areas to improve the chat feature: usability, safety, accessibility and optimization.
Various features I worked on increased chat participation on mobile and web, reduced harmful messaging by 70%, and optimized chat across multiple platforms. I introduced feature parity with our competitors as well as improved accessibility for our millions of global users. By helping users compose and suggest ways to participate in chat, I helped improve the retention of our users from new users to becoming frequent users on our site.
Dark mode was one of the most requested features our users had requested in Twitch. Alongside our systems team, I helped implement a dark mode chat and ensured accessibility. I created landscape mobile chat experiences to allow our users to participate in the conversation no matter format they experienced Twitch in.
Twitch offers a wide range of emotes, including global emotes that are available to all users and channel-specific emotes that are unique to individual Twitch channels. The emote picker typically provides users with a searchable interface where they can browse through and select the emote they want to use in their messages. This feature enhances the chat experience on Twitch by allowing users to express themselves using visual icons.
I worked on optimizing our emote picker and allowing the ability to quickly sort through subscribed channel emotes with the bottom tab bar.
Optimizing the Emote Picker allowed for greater ease of use and wayfinding. I also included an easier way to unlock and subscribe to locked emotes which improved our Twitch subscription business.
Simply typing "@" will bring up a "sheet" above the input to allow users to quickly mention live viewers in chat. When a user is mentioned in a Twitch chat message, they typically receive a notification, depending on their notification settings, informing them that they have been mentioned. This helps to draw their attention to the message and encourages interaction between users in the chat.
At mentions are commonly used for various purposes on Twitch, such as asking questions, responding to comments, acknowledging other users, or initiating conversations with specific individuals. They facilitate communication and engagement within the Twitch community.
Chat filters in Twitch are tools that allow users to customize and control the content they see in chat rooms during live streams. These filters help users manage the chat experience by allowing them to hide or restrict certain types of messages based on criteria they specify.
By allowing individuals to adjust various toggles to turn off offensive or unsafe language in their chat experience it helped maintain a positive and enjoyable environment for viewers and streamers alike.
Chat modes on Twitch refer to different settings or configurations that control how chat messages are displayed and interacted with during a live stream. These modes provide options for both streamers and viewers to customize their chat experience.
The modes we implemeted were: Follower only mode, Subscriber only mode, Emote only mode and slow mode chat. All modes give the streamer the ability control their chat experience, some with providing more safety than others.
Mobile examples of how a streamer could granularly control their chat. Within these modes you can set the length of time a user has been following or subscribing to participate in chat.
In all modes there are ways to understand more about each one, and how you may be able to participate in them. These chat modes give streamers and moderators various tools to manage chat behavior, foster engagement, and create the desired atmosphere during live streams on Twitch.
