Bridging the gap between internal partnership teams, Twitch creators, and 3rd-party sponsors, Atlas was a recruitment portal for activations and sponsorships that allowed 360 feedback between all parties.
My responsibilities: Lead designer, User/UX Researcher & Analyst, Product Manager
Project timeline: Q1 - Q3 2018
The core need: Simplify the sponsorship process and create a premium content catalog that allowed for feedback by Twitch, creators, and their sponsors for each activation.
Atlas began as a massive workbook that the Partnerships team manually updated and our job was to create a simple dashboard that would help streamline our Partnerships teams’ various workflows. Primarily, it aimed to make contract signing and sponsorship activations vastly simpler tasks. It soon grew into a massive CMS for both internal teams and external agencies who used Twitch as a means of advertising, or who engaged in content creation themselves.
As one of my first projects at Twitch, Atlas was a proving ground for not only my design work, but for being able to collaborate across internal teams and our 3rd-party partners. This entire project was done with a team of 3 - myself, a front-end engineer, and a backend engineer.
Since this tool was originally built for internal team usage, we began brainstorming alongside the Partnerships team to outline their core needs for this product. Through this, Atlas' initial product statement was born:
Atlas would encompass:
My first round of concepts aimed to address the basic IA of Atlas, exploring 4 main pages:
1. Content Owners: This was the extra layer needed by internal teams that allowed them to manage their individual clients, and see a brief list of all upcoming events they needed to focus on.
2. Overview: Atlas’ entry point for external clients, which showed breakdowns of aggregate performance analytics, a list of events, and their top performing channels.
3. Channels: Detailed analytics for each individual channel for that content owner, browsable through the left nav. If the channel was live, we could display the channel's live stream and status. We would also populate a list of upcoming events that channel was involved in.
4. Events: Tables of all events for that content owner, sortable by channel (pictured below), season, and category. Here, users could create and edit events and see details of each, including duration, participation, and contract info.
Following our initial concept work, we had the opportunity to collaborate with our internal stakeholders in conducting UXR sessions with a few of our 3rd-party partners to garner feedback for the product. These UXR sessions led to further improvements to the tool, including a restructuring events specifically.
First, we expanded the functionality of our left nav to include products as an additional layer, which the user could expand to show all contained products, or click on to directly navigate to that product page to view insights and analytics.
Second, we added a new layer above events, called seasons. While we originally assumed that our external partners would primarily use the analytics surfaces in Atlas, it became incredibly clear they were in much greater need of a workspace to organize and manage their activations as both events and seasons of events. While events acted as the basic building block of seasons, they could also occur as one-off activations and did not require participation in a season. Thus, our main nav was expanded:
With events becoming the primary feature of Atlas, we greatly expanded our backend support for filtering through different events. This version of the product also included the ability for users to select exactly which filters they wished to see within the “Additional Filters” modal, which would dynamically update the filter bar.
We also included the ability for users to batch-create events through a variety of means, including CSV import and a bulk creation tool.
Lastly, our partners stressed the need for a workspace in which they could manage all contracts with Twitch regarding each activation. This mirrored a key need from internal stakeholders in standardizing contracts and how our own teams managed them, allowing for more time managing creators, and less time updating spreadsheets.
Prior to its official release, we implemented further design changes within the Content Owner and Events spaces.
Internal teams would now see the content owner framework in the header navigation, so they could switch on the fly and allow for easier management of that content owner’s details, channels, type, etc.
Events were also streamlined to allow on-the-fly editing of single events, and a more accessible interface for managing all details of events on the listings page itself. This was driven by a need to see all channels involved in an event without cluttering the listings with hundreds of channel names in many instances.
We also vastly improved the dedicated events workspace to create a much more robust and easy-to-use section for adding events both individually and in bulk through a more streamlined process.
Our final improvement was a highly-requested item from partners - the ability to add a new event from the record of an existing or past event. Since we stored this data for reporting and analytics, we could allow partners who held yearly or monthly competitions, for instance, to use past events as a ‘template’ and simply change a few items before publishing.
Atlas was officially released in February of 2020 and continues to be the primary tool used by multiple teams at both Twitch and Amazon for contracts, activations, and Twitch integrations from our 3rd-party partners. It has continued to be developed and expanded on since, and now includes Amazon integration for things like discount codes, timed merch releases, and game key distribution!