Introduction
Customer Problem
As a community grows, understanding audience composition and remembering details about a specific community member or keeping track of who is new to the community becomes more difficult and increases a creator’s cognitive load while streaming. Creators can use a few of the existing identifiers to isolate messages from sub-segments of their viewers i.e. badges and channel point redemptions. However, these are dependent on the viewer choosing to share this information. Creators can also use information present in the user profile card (follow age, moderation history etc.) - however this requires active interaction with chat usernames and is not tenable for creators as they stream and use chat as a read only surface.
Why Chat Highlights
The most popular concept during a study that I ran for the chat team focusing on tools to help creators manage, recognize and engage their community was the ability to highlight chat messages.
In addition, I designed and launched an experiment to highlight the first message of a new chatter to a channel. The experiment showed improvement in the number of messages sent by a new chatter which we believe is due to increased welcoming behavior and recognition on the part of the creator. In a follow up survey over 90% of participants that responded indicated that they were interested in an expanded highlights service.
Details
Initial Thinking
Expanding chat highlights from the existing first chatter highlight would require us to build a dedicated settings/management area for it. This would have to be built with scalability in mind. To get the ball rolling we decided to add subscribers, moderators and mentions to this chat highlight system. We reached this decision based on a survey where we asked creators what highlight options they would like to see.
Visual Design
With first chatter highlight being so successful, I decided to make the new highlights match it visually. The highlight colors I chose to use for them matched the badge of the viewer or their color within our activity feed. There was one issue I wanted to address based on user feedback I had seen for first chatter highlight. This had to do with creators not knowing whether the message was highlighted for everyone or just them.
Minimized View
With us adding more highlights, I had to make sure that we provided our creators with a minimized view. For our larger creators where chat moves pretty fast, the default size would take up too much space.
Dedicated Settings
The settings for chat highlights will live within the main chat settings menu. This is where all chat settings live for Twitch users. However, clicking on it within the setting menu will open up a dedicated modal to manage multiple settings. I also provided the option to add a shortcut below the chat input to access these settings even quicker. Within settings creators will be able to toggle the highlights on or off, choose the size and understand the structure.
Feedback & Updates
I took the above options to our internal design review held with design leadership. While everyone was excited that we were finally building a scalable chat highlights system, there were pieces of feedback that needed to be addressed before shipping this product.
Highlight Design
The main feedback heard here is that this design is too similar to our public highlights that everyone can see. To tackle this feedback I worked with the core design team. After working through multiple options I ended up on a deign that uses a container. This container helps elevate the message and also with its closed design makes it feel more private, helping with the visibility issues. To further help with the visibility issues, I added icons in the top right that indicate who the message can be highlighted for. The minimized view that contained the pill was chosen to help with scanning quickly and accessibility.
Settings
I updated the settings design to match the new highlights. I also worked with our marketing team to use clearer language.
Discovery
One of the things that was brought up during the feedback session, is that we should turn on all the highlights by default. However, I believed that this was not the right solution. Not all highlights are important to creators and only they know best. As such, I proposed that we turn on the shortcut to the settings by default and use a coachmark to grab creator’s attention.
Details
Results & New Highlights
The creator chat highlight starter kit saw positive results in first time chatters, live minutes watched, and total revenue. Given the initial positive results coupled with earlier success on the first time chatter highlight, chat highlights went forward with a full rollout. Soon after we added two more highlights that would help creators with growing their communities.
Raider Chat Highlight
A raid on Twitch is when a creator takes their viewers to another creators live channel and a raider is a viewer who arrives to a creators channel via a raid. Converting raiders to returning viewers is a great way for creators to grow their community. With chat highlights being launched to everyone, this was the right time to bring add a raider highlight to help creators do this.
With the addition of the raider highlight, I added a combo highlight pattern. If the raider chatter for the first time ever in a channel, then they would show up as a combo. I also added a timer for this highlight so that the view of chat for a creator would not get clogged up with highlights. This was the first highlight showing additional context about the viewer at a glance, the channel they came from.
This highlight was launched as an experiment and proved very successful, leading to a full launch.
It was observed that viewers who participated in raids that target Opt-In Group channels on average demonstrated statistically significant increases in five minute plays (+7.4%), vs (+7.2%), and minutes watched (+8.9%) for the raid session.
Viewer engagement for opt-in channels when they were raided demonstrated statistically significant lifts vs viewer engagement for channels in the control group.
The average number of chatters amongst the groups of viewers that participated in raids that targeted channels in the opt-in and opt-out group were higher than those in the control group.
Returning Chatter Highlight
A returning chatter is a new viewer who has chatted at least twice in the last 30 days. Based on research done to understand the types of recognition viewers value, highlighting messages from these viewers should help convert them to channel regulars.
This highlight was launched as an experiment as well, leading to a full launch.
We observed statistically significant lifts for Tier 4 (average visits per active user and average weekly visits per active user) and Tier 3 streamers (minutes watched live). These are our higher tier of streamers with larger audiences.
Conclusion
Creator Chat Highlights has been providing meaningful benefits to Twitch creators by allowing them respond to viewer messages important to them in a timely fashion. They were also met with an overall positive reception.
As it was built to be scalable, other teams at Twitch have easily added highlights to the feature. These have ranged from safety highlights like a suspicious user, to monetary ones like pinned messages.
In the future I would like to be able to give creators more customization options like:
Choose the color they would like for a highlight.
Change the priority order.
A new minimized view that colors the background of the message.
