The main objective of this project was to imagine what moderator tools would look like in Twitch's app. I knew I couldn't include everything, so my aim was figure which tools were the most useful, and implement them in a way that was faithful to Twitch's brand and overall design philosophy.

I started off this project, as I do many projects, with user research. I had a good baseline of knowledge in terms of Twitch’s platform and culture, but I needed to understand a moderator’s experience, needs, and pain points on a deeper level.

I used the reddit survey to gather users to interview and used the forum research to build out my interview questions. Once my interview protocol was ready I began my interviews.

Upon completing my interviews, I learned which tools were the most used by moderators, which are presented in order in the following list:

With this information, I knew that I needed a better understanding of the current experiences Twitch's mod-view could afford on PC so that I could better implement them on mobile. I figured the best way to do that was with a blueprint.

In the midst of my research acquisition, I also began playing around with a few layout ideas that came to mind. Nothing serious quite yet, but I wanted to make sure that I didn't waste any design potentials.

After a few more short interviews with experienced moderators, I synthesized my insights into a few of my user's primary needs:

With these things in mind, I knew that I had my work set out for me. Speed of which they can use their tools seemed like the upmost importance. I also needed a way to contextualize the "intuitiveness" of a PC into a mobile format. Once I had these criteria in mind, I hopped onto Figma to see how I could implement them into some of my existing designs.

I started playing around with the structure of the moderator tools in some sort of dashboard. I wanted to emphasize the speed at which mods could access their tools. Further testing on some of these designs though showed that a dashboard like this could be too overwhelming, especially when trying to do more simple tasks. This lead me to streamlining a few of the most used features(banning, kicking, etc.), and using the dashboard setup for more less used tools.

Next up was adding the less used tools without it feeling clunky to use on mobile. I went back to my dashboard models and started designing based off of those. I quickly found that, while the tools were displayed well and intentional, I found that they were very far off of Twitch's brand. Twitch often favors subtly and minimalism when they can.

I ended up scrapping the blockier dashboard structure, and tried to embrace Twitch's style a little bit more with simpler designs in existing structures.

I had a lot of fun with this project, partly because it was about something that I cared about, and partly because it was a struggle. Obviously, things are fun when you are interested in them, that's just how things tend to work. The struggle, however, was fun because it truly challenged me to focus on one of my weaker skills, visual design. I’ve always taken a more research-heavy approach to my designs because it’s what I know well. It’s not like I was incapable of doing visual stuff, but I would certainly be struggling when I had to. This project was focused entirely on visuals and style, and it forced me to create original designs that were on-brand to Twitch. It was fun becoming familiar with Figma again and learning how to think from a more artistic perspective.