2021 - 2022

Xbox Media Strategy

The Xbox Community vision was to facilitate meaningful player connections, sharing, and discovery of content and friends in safe and inclusive sub-communities to encourage players to consolidate their play with friends in Xbox. As a design lead on the team, I worked with partners to define one of the pillars of this strategy centered around user generated content and executed to deliver 2 features that would later be shipped globally.

Key contributions — Design Strategy & Execution
Strategy impact — Global leadership team aligned on strategy and design.

Feature Impact — Mobile Clip Editor
Total number of posts increased +68% Year/Year (YOY).

Feature Impact — Web Watch & Play
Captured 40% of existing share volume with link shares (target 20%)

 
 

Content is an increasingly important part of player engagement. Impact analysis by our data team showed that media consumption drove increases in gameplay, retention, and lifetime value. However, despite generating 160M clips every month, we’re seeing low engagement on that content.

 
 
 
 

We found out clip engagement is low due to the lack of creation tools. Xbox didn’t currently have any pathway to creating higher quality content from the console.

 
 
 
 

We needed to make content creation more compelling.

 
 

Our strategy involved integrating key features that worked together in tandem to create a flywheel that works into itself in creating a self-sustaining content ecosystem.

Players wanted the bar to be lower for producing great content, wanted easier ways to share that content externally, and lastly for us to help inspire their friends to join in and play together.

What we proposed was approved by the leadership team and work began to fund 2 features to put plans into motion.

  1. Xbox Mobile Editor

  2. Web Watch & Play

 
 
 
 
 

Xbox Mobile Editor

An important piece of landing our UGC Media strategy is to give our users more ways to customize their content and express themselves. We believe this will not only make the act of creation more fun, it will increase the quality of the content that is created and lead to increased viewership and engagement of the content downstream, which fuels the social incentive loop to create more content.

Currently, clips captured on the console go to a shared media library with the Xbox Mobile app. The goal was to position the Mobile app as the best place to trim Xbox clips. For launch, the most important priority was to get the core trim feature right. Though the feature seemed straight forward on the surface, the process that we went through was anything but that.

 
 

Accessibility

I initially faced challenges with regards to designing for different device sizes, orientations, input methods, font scaling, which caused additional rounds of iterations to resolve accessibility unknowns. To foster collaboration and alignment, I conducted weekly share outs for the entire development team, prioritizing transparency throughout the entire journey.

 
 
 
 
 

Watch & Play

Web Watch & Play is an endpoint that targets people who aren’t necessarily Xbox customers yet. From the Xbox Mobile App, players can generate web links to their clips so that anyone can view them regardless of whether or not they are signed in.

 
 

The team saw a huge opportunity to streamline Xbox’s share-to-external experience by building our own web watching experience to capture a portion of those anonymous viewers.

We started off with a few metrics from our data team that prompted our initial investigations. 20M pieces of game media are shared externally from the Xbox Mobile App, either through directly sharing or downloading to device. Additionally, we also see 3M weekly anonymous viewers from various 3rd party websites.

What ended up happening was that the '‘copy-link’ action massively overachieved our expectations and even increased our total external shares by +40% (Target was 15%).

 
 
 

Learnings

  • Navigating Quality. This Ppoject opened paths to address quality issues and design debt and helped us revamp our existing design system.

  • Sometimes, zooming out is essential. Success came through thinking outside of daily scope and existing boundaries within our organization.