New vision: Stryda AI videos and social platform

Overview

In spring 2023 Stryda transformed from a competitive arena into the ultimate gamers’ hub, a central stage where players could flaunt their triumphs and celebrate their gaming prowess by a click of a button.

We started a project where we created an AI video recorder together with an editor and updated the platform into a gaming-centric social media platform. The AI automatically captured your in-game highlights, paired them with music and transitions, and provided a ready-to-publish video for instant online sharing on Stryda.

The social platform would focus on every Stryda players gaming identity being able to share their gaming stats, outcome of their matches and videos on their best moments in-game. With inspiration of common social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X and Strava we added functionality like sharing, commenting and likes with hopes of making the platform more engaging than ever before.

Building the AI and all the functionality connected to it and how users would manage their videos by the AI had to be seamless, intuitive and offer a great experience. All of these things where a bit complicated, so we had to sit down with developers and the product team to go through our tech, possibilities, restraints and user flows for how the AI need to behave from start to finish for a good user experience. We also sat down to discuss when and where users need to get clear system information about the states and how they could publish their video on Stryda.

Flowchart

To communicate with the development and design teams on how everything was connected, I created a flowchart of the entire flow, both from a system perspective and from a user’s point of view. This was necessary to ensure that backend understood the type of functionality we wanted and for frontend to understand the states they needed from backend and what type of user-facing designs were going to be delivered from our UI designers.

By creating the flow chart we could see parts on what were missing or felt too complicated from both a tech perspective but also from a user perspective.

Quick time-line explaination of the AI and publishin video when Stryda is installed:

• Play a match in Valorant and get a notification inside the game that Stryda is recording.

• After the match, the AI is doing its magic with creating a ready-to-publish video inclusing transitions and music.

• User will get notified on the Stryda platform when the video is ready.

• User can publish the video on Stryda straight away, together with their match stats and other Stryda stats, or edit the video.

Platform updates

For us being able to offer a home screen focusing on a social feed but at the same time remain it as a quick way getting an overview of a all the activites that a user currently have on Stryda we decided to remove the left navigation and focusing on having the navigation on the top. This decision affected all pages on Stryda and we had to re-design the platform on most pages to fit the new vision.

Before and after: a comparison of the home screens

Below are some screens from the Stryda 3.0 platform after the re-design.

Usability tests and interviews

Our UI developers created a prototype in Tailwind, a front-end framework, to make it as real as possible, as we wanted feedback on the whole experience -the new design and the AI video functionality.

We performed usability tests and user interviews at SPACE in Stockholm, a gaming center with over a hundred fully equipped gaming setups, and a breathtaking esports arena with a capacity of 450 people. The perfect place to meet people, getting them to try out our product and investigate how our re-design and AI video recorder would make people feel.

Some of the insights

• All respondens reacted positive to the AI video recorder and its functionalities, both as an automatic tool and the possibility of editing the videos.
• During the evaluation, we identified copy issues and identified design solutions that required further examination.
• We found a critical pain point in terms of publishing posts on social media and realised we had to make the AI functionality better aligned with our users mental models.

The tests and interviews helped us moving forward with the project and we had new ideas and hypotheses to design and develop, making the AI and the platform even smoother and easier to use than before.

Learnings

Even though we didn’t have the opportunity to release our AI or our new platform, I had a lot of fun, and I learned a lot about gamers, AI, video recording, and editing. It was a great experience seeing our old product grow into something the majority of the people at Stryda believed in and worked hard for.

• I grew as a UX designer working on a fast-paced project where we had to temporarily cut down on user research and go with what we already had gathered.
  • Despite the cutdown, I could still promote usability testing and interviews as part of the workflow, but also as a step in our onboarding process when new colleagues or interns started at Stryda.
  • I made sure we always had a poll rolling or about to roll on our existing platform to gather feedback (to ensure we didn’t remove important/appreciated features or services).
• I became a UX lead, being the voice of our players together with my teams.
  • Arguing for designs based on user input became one of the most important tasks I could do while balancing business and tech needs.
  • Guiding my team and colleagues on UX best practices to ensure our design system followed UX conventions and accessibility rules.
  • Being the “collector of user insights” from all departments to present to our CPO and others in management was challenging but rewarding.
  • Presenting data and insights during our All Hands (when the whole company gathered to get information on the latest from the different departments) was so scary and fun at the same time.

And one last thing:

I have never had so much fun at work as I’ve had at Stryda even though it has been challenging sometimes. After I started we went trough 3 reorganisations, we moved offices 3 times and had a change of our CEO. We secured an investment of half a billion Swedish Kronor – one of the world’s largest within esports but had to cease operation 3 years later during inflation and hard times in general in the industry.

Thank you to everyone I have worked with at Stryda; it has been a pleasure and an experience that went above and beyond anything I could have asked for.