Insights.gg is an application that makes it easier for gamers to improve their performance with useful tools to record, review, and share videos.
At the time of this project, Insights.gg was a web application tailored for professional Esports teams. Users could upload gameplay footage to collaborate asynchronously or in real-time, utilizing timestamped annotations, comments, and drawing tools. For certain games, our platform also employed machine learning to identify and analyze players' in-game performances.
The initial product targeted the competitive gaming space and we received positive feedback from the greater gaming community as well, with a lot of interest in expanding our feature offerings to be suitable for amateur and casual gamers.
Our collaborative video review platform requires users to upload videos captured by third-party applications, leading to lengthy workflows and delays in product utilization.
Simplify the process for gamers to record, upload, and share in-game footage, making it easier to integrate our platform into our users' gaming experience to increase user retention.
We were fortunate enough to have many people in our Discord channel interested in participating in our research. To start, I sent a survey to get quantitative data on people’s gaming habits and to screen participants for user interviews. While waiting to analyze those responses, I conducted competitive analysis on known apps as well as those mentioned by users in the surveys. Lastly, I interviewed users who like to record their gameplay to gain a deeper understanding of their process and goals.
Participants: 64
Method: Google Forms
- Gather quantitative data on users' gaming habits
- Screen for users who record or want to record in-game footage for user interviews.
- Identify similar tools and platforms that users have used or liked.
- 78% respondents play multiple matches per gaming session.
- 81% have shared a clip or recording of their game to friends or online community.
- Casual/amateur gamers are more likely to share short clips of matches.
Collaborative effort from Insights team
- Heuristic evaluation of recording tools mentioned in user surveys and Discord channel.
- Heuristic evaluation of video review platforms mentioned in user surveys and Discord channel.
- Competitive analysis matrix.
- SWOT analysis.
- No all-in-one solutions that is compatible across multiple game titles (all-in-one solution would include recording games, collaborative video review tools, and game statistics).
- Game recording tools are prevalent in popular games, most have the game replay feature.
- Not all games use the same keyboard/mouse interactions, some applications negatively affect in-game experience.
Participants: 6
Method: Google Meet, Discord
- Understand users' goals and pain points for recording in-game footage.
- Understand users' end-to-end process for recording, reviewing, and sharing gameplay.
- Dive deeper into participants' gaming habits.
- Users share clips to show exciting in-game moments with others.
- Users tend to record full matches to review their performance and get feedback from a coach.
- Users usually play multiple matches at a time before reviewing their recordings.
- Users get frustrated when they forget to record a good match.
- Users don't like applications with in-game overlays that interferes with their game.
In the discovery phase of this project, we came across a development platform called Overwolf - an engine that lets developer applications operate in games by providing existing apis and adhering to game code of conducts. By partnering with Overwolf we would be able to use their technology to save engineering effort and have our product showcased in their app store too.
We identified two different goals that users had for sharing gameplay footage. Majority of users wanted to share clips of epic in-game moments with friend and online communities. However, there were also many users who wanted to share full match replays to game coaches in order to improve their game performance.
- Minimal user effort to record and share videos.
- Auto-record matches.
- Customizable hotkeys for compatibility across games.
- Use keyboard shortcuts to start/stop recordings and hide any overlays.
- Utilize apis to identify and auto-record important in-game events.
- Leverage our existing machine learning technology to analyze and highlight key moments.
In-game event capture setting enabled (for supported games only).
Full gameplay capture setting enabled.
Through our partnership with Overwolf, we received valuable consultation from their engineers and leveraged their existing frameworks and APIs, significantly reducing our development effort. To simplify the end-to-end experience of our solution, we relied heavily on apis to automate key moments to capture.
Video of design prototype
Insights Capture with auto-record enabled using game-specific APIs to detect game start and end.
We reduced the number of steps and tools that gamers used in order to capture and share in-game moments with others. By simplifying the workflow and leveraging apis, we significantly minimized user effort and saw an increase in user retention.
- Increased DAU (daily active users) by 25 k
- Increased the 2-week user retention rate by 10%
Business goal for this period was to increase 18k (DAU) and 7% (2-week retention).
