THE
SESSIONS
EXPERIENCE
BRIGHT LIVE
2021–2022
OVERVIEW
Built on the Zoom SDK, we created a custom live virtual session to deliver the best participatory audience experience, as well as to give hosts intuitive control while moderating their own live sessions.
BACKGROUND
WHAT IS BRIGHT LIVE?
WHAT ARE SESSIONS?
The Sessions Experience is the interactive video conference platform that allows audience members to ask questions and allows hosts to invite multiple people to participate “on stage.”
THE PROBLEM TO SOLVE
USER PROBLEM
Hosts:
As a Creator hosting a Session on Bright, I want to be able to lead an interactive and engaging session without being distracted by controls or tripped up by technical difficulties.
Audiences:
As a paying attendee of a Bright Session, I want to have a unique, engaging, and intimate experience with a Creator I admire that feels worth my time and money.
BUSINESS NEED
As a new company, we want to launch with a product just slick enough to give our users a good experience but invest a minimal amount of build that allows us the resources to learn from running live sessions and iterate based on what we learn.
GOALS
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Skin the MVP with new branding to get it up and running to allow us to test and learn
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Develop a slick V1 to deliver both hosts and audience members with a quality experience, measured in qualitative interviews and post-session surveys
STARTING OUT
THE PROTOTYPE
When I joined, Bright was near complete on the MVP of their Sessions Experience, built on top of the Zoom SDK.
A SKELETON OF A BRAND
We were mid-way through branding with an outside agency. The Design department was not involved in this branding effort when I joined, and was only focused on the product. We were delivered a partially-complete branding system that wasn’t optimized for a digital product, and not ready for digital implementation, so swift changes needed to be made in order to skin the Experience. (See the Bright Rebrand project page)
A QUICK RESKIN AND MINOR IMPROVEMENTS
With a very limited brand, the loss of our Design Director, and an extremely strict timeline (<2 months), we re-skinned the app and launched the MVP.
Improvements Added
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Countdown to start session
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Ability to clear stage
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Encouraging empty states
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Welcome to stage + unmute
Remaining Issues
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Creator X and Participant X were still the same
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Q&C with video attached was a new pattern, and not intuitive
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Very little education
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Muting issues
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No ability to delete one’s own comment
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No speaking indicator
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No full screen
LOGISTICS
TEAM
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1 Design Lead
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1 Design IC
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1 PM
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1 User Researcher
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7 Engineers
TIMELINE
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MVP Re-skin: <2 months
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V1: ~5 months
OBSERVATION + RESEARCH
MVP OBSERVATIONS
We launched the MVP and began holding real, live Sessions with some of our early Creator partners, and Bright employees attended all Sessions to observe.
MVP LEARNINGS
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Participants wanted to to submit questions and still communicate
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Creators had a hard time identifying which questions to answer and who to engage with
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Creators wanted quick feedback from the audience
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People wanted to share out their session
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There was a fair amount of surprise and confusion around being brought to stage
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Some Creators accidentally started or ended their session
BRAINSTORMING
We held two brainstorms with the entire team: CEO, PM, Research, Designers, Engineers, and the Talent team. It was important to establish co-ownership and to make sure all expertise was represented and exchanged to the extent possible. We synthesized ideas according to votes and user needs and scoped out which features we should prioritize against company focus areas.
Prioritized features
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Separate Questions & Comments
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Allow Creators to chat and share links
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Upvoting of questions
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Show Creators and Audiences more faces at once
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Add moderator messaging for Creators
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Add time counter
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Clarify the bring-to-stage flow for everyone
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Clarify start/stop session for Creators
FEEDBACK
We got feedback from the Talent team that the Creator Experience might be too overwhelming, and because we wanted to keep experiences as similar as possible to lighten the Engineering lift, we decided to minimize differences between the two.
We opted for maintaining the ability to see up to two panels at once, and moved navigation to the right to allow for features we might add in the future, such as audience polls. We also wanted to allow users to close both the Questions and Chat panels to provide the option for a more focused and immersive in-session experience.
FINAL DESIGNS
CREATOR EXPERIENCE
AUDIENCE EXPERIENCE
MOBILE
RESULTS
OUTCOMES
Though we’d decided to parallel the compromised design with the experimental prototype, the company decided that having an app built on Zoom was posing too high a risk to the company’s success.
Engineering refocused all efforts to building out a web-based experience (using the updated design at least) before considering the prototype.
LEARNINGS
Diving into execution mode can make it difficult to stay focused on the bigger picture and strategy. Schedule checkins with other leadership and frequent QA syncs.
There is always room for process improvements, especially at a remote company. Stay flexible and open and remember people comprehend at different speeds.
Make sure, aside from getting and documenting decisions from leadership, to always be clear in laying out what those decisions mean for the team as they’re being made.
DESIGN ITERATION
CREATOR EXPERIENCE
AUDIENCE EXPERIENCE
