The dashboard serves as the central hub for Twitch streaming, where millions of streamers manage all aspects of their live content. My goal is to redesign the dashboard to enhance navigation and boost feature utilization, creating a more intuitive and engaging experience for users.
Role Lead Designer
Team 1 Product Manager / 1 Engineers / 2 Researchers
Hypotheses
If creators can access actionable insights and recommendations through the redesigned dashboard information architecture, they will be better equipped to enhance their skills. This improvement will enable them to grow their audience, foster relationships with other streamers, and engage their viewers more effectively during live broadcasts.
90%
Engage existing audience
85%
Grow Audience
79%
Improve Skills
Discover and define
I conducted an informational audit that identified congested areas, especially in analytics and settings, highlighting a misalignment between the information architecture and user needs. To address this, I collaborated with a researcher to identify key metrics & led collaboration sessions with six product managers to categorize information based on their expertise and upcoming features. This enabled me to create various layouts and reconfigure tools for better alignment with user mental models.
User research
Through multiple user sessions, I gained insights into the product’s strengths, weaknesses, and necessary features for growth. Overall, participants found the new designs visually approachable, and the feature placement and content organization aligned well with their expectations. However, a key concern was the misalignment between category themes and displayed content, leading users to suggest that primary features either be moved to more relevant categories or serve as standalone elements.
“I think it’s a lot easier to navigate through this UI…I just kind of automatically knew that I had to come in here for any of that [feature], which isn’t the case on the [public design]. I always feel like I forget which menu things are under and I click a couple of different places before I get to where I’m looking for. So I like how this is laid out. Things are grouped better. There’s less stuff on the left side here. All that stuff is kind of just tucked away in its own nice little place.”
Sitemapping
Creating a sitemap throughout the design process offered valuable insights into the information architecture and highlighted key problem areas. This approach for this product ensured clarity in structure, scalability, and optimal information density, paving the way for both current and future features.
Before
Iteration 1
Simplification and consolidation
The original navigation was overwhelming, presenting too many specific options without clear guidance, leaving users unsure of their current view or how to navigate. To address this, I created solutions based on fundamental design principles and user research, aiming for a layout that prioritizes accessibility, usability, and a clear hierarchy. This reduced nested pages from four to two, making navigation easier and eliminating confusing, hard-to-find content.
Navigation
The current dashboard makes it unclear to understand what view you are on and for whom. I redesigned the navigation to improve clarity and mitigate confusion. This offers a dynamic experience based on the user.
Smart search
I recommended adding key features, such as a smart search bar that improves page navigation and provides information about our features, enhancing the user experience and making it more enjoyable.
New and improved patterns
A key business objective was to increase user adoption of new features. In a competitive dashboard environment, every feature needs visibility. This prompted me to create new patterns that effectively showcase new features on relevant pages, enhancing product visibility.
Details & Documentation
Maintaining accurate information and established sources of truth is vital for design projects, especially those involving multiple teams. In a rapidly evolving organization, leveraging past insights helps team members tackle priority challenges efficiently instead of determining element placements. Systems must be designed to scale and adapt, so our internal data and design foundations should reflect this flexibility to support stakeholders. Establishing guiding principles, frameworks, and design libraries fosters a robust and efficient system from the ground up.
Keep Learning
Designing for a system can lead to an overreliance on data, which, while essential for understanding user behavior, may misrepresent actual patterns due to human unpredictability.
The ambiguity of design is what makes our work unique; processes are rarely linear, and insights can prompt reevaluation of invested directions, indicating areas for improvement rather than flaws.
In a complex environment with many enhancement opportunities, I became aware of scope creep and the timing for new ideas, prompting me to create living documents to outline potential quick wins and future iterations (v2).