Social on PlayStation

2017 - Interaction Designer

The objective

In 2017, the Playstation design & product team set off on a shared goal to increase the number of social connections an average user had on their platform. This direction was the result of an analysis that showed current users who engaged in more social activity via the Playstation had higher satisfaction, longer engagements, and overall spent more the platform.

For a user, this meant their gaming experience would not just be playing or finishing a game. But also playing games with friends, sharing content with other gamers, and participating in a community conversation surrounding the games they are playing.

The outcome

A 9x increase of following activity on the month of launch verses previous months.

Leveraging existing research to inform a hypothesis

To begin at a place of research and a user-centered mentality, we began collecting and synthesizing existing quantitative and qualitative user data. Here are a few insights that stood out.

Users' general engagement and motivation were the highest when they began a new game.
Users had many existing tangentially related gaming behaviors on and off the platform. Behaviors such as watching videos, using gaming guides, and following other gamers on platforms such as Twitch and Youtube.

As a result, users would seek out other gamers for best practices and shared excitement when beginning a new game. This gave us a clear idea of when we should be engaging the users and how we should be engaging other users.

The "when" being whenever the user was diving into a new game. The “how” being making social suggestions based on content and content creators.

We designed a system that allowed users to follow content creators playing the same game as them. These suggestions would update when the user began a new game.

This hypothesis was followed up by a prototyping and user testing initiative.

Prototype for testing

Prototyped developed with visual design for in lab user testing. Testing for both solution validation and usability. A new experience that recommends games based on the current user’s gaming choices and utilizes content as a key driver of social engagement.

Multi-day in lab testing with real PlayStation users.

Myself and visual design lead Paul Banks worked with SIE San Diego Studio to test and observe PlayStation users usage of the new feature. Research revealed a dramatic uptick in social engagement based content decisions. Users were especially likely to engage socially with users who posted videos verses images. Overall users were motivated to engage other users who shared gaming interest and created engaging content.