INTRODUCTION

OOOH.TV

social media and creator platform

Oooh was a social network that combined interactive content and gaming to make social media engaging instead of passive. Think TikTok meets gaming: creators and friend groups hosted playable challenges. As the sole product designer on discovery and systems, I redesigned how people found and picked a game, then turned those patterns into a shared Figma library the team built from without me.

Use Left and Right arrow keys to browse; Home and End reach the first and last items. You can also swipe or drag.

Entry Point, View All and What’s Hot, adapted from my Host Discover View handoff, Oct 2022, alongside a discovery exploration.

ただ眺めるだけじゃなく、一緒に遊べて、気持ちよく過ごせるソーシャルメディアを作りたい。

WHAT

A Series A social game and creator platform. We launched it globally out of beta in 2022 to 10,000 creators, who signed up through our creator site.

編集を支えるデザインシステムも、ブンブン動くように作った。

ROLE

Senior Product Designer

About 6 min read

SCOPE

Product design, design systems

検索する言葉が浮かばなくても、見ているうちに「これ、やってみたい」が見つかるといい。

Making the next game easier to find

At an all-hands after VidCon 2022, one observation kept coming up: first-time users scrolled the thumbnail wall instead of tapping into a game. Too many games, no way to tell them apart. The paradox of choice turned into analysis paralysis.

The old catalog showed posters, play counts and rewards, but not what you did in a game. My job was everything leading into a game; other teams owned gameplay and recording.

My role

I joined Oooh.tv as Senior Product Designer in May 2022, working with the founders, our Design Director, three PMs and our game studio. As the sole designer on these surfaces, I owned six connected parts end to end: host onboarding, discovery, the shared Figma library, the creator site and earnings portal, web-to-app previews, and post-round reactions.

How I worked across the studio

Between the studio and the product

Working across the weekly game studio and core product let me design at the seam between content and UI: shaping card rules so weekly game art never broke the feed, and building web previews so links shared on Instagram or Twitch dropped fans straight into the round. In my first week, I also designed our VidCon and TwitchCon booths and the pink Oooh claw machine.

Teach people how to host

New hosts didn’t need a directory on day one; they needed a first round that taught the loop. I pinned three pink Get Started cards above the catalog for different comfort levels: Q&A for camera-shy players, a face-tracking game like K-Beat, and a rotating studio release.

Colin, our founder, was dead set on making those three a gated checklist in the discovery view. I advocated against the gate and brought a compromise with evidence behind it: in intern critiques and test sessions, gatekeeping caused tension. Interns clicked around trying to escape it, and first-time testers wanted to explore, not finish a checklist. The cost: a new player could skip the lesson, so every card had to explain its own game.

Get StartedSome of the best most essential ooohsInfoBring Your Own BeatCreate your own beat, and let others mix and match theirs with yours.+ 25 HostsUseInfoHead Above WaterHow long can you keep screaming into your mic to stay afloat?!+ 1.2k HostsUseInfoK-BeatA fun rhythm music game+ 25.5k HostsUseWhat’s Hot 🔥See AllInfoQ&AAn Oooh template that allows you to interact with your community in a Q&A format.+ 100 HostsUseInfoHead Above WaterHow long can you keep screaming into your mic to stay afloat?!+ 100 HostsUse
Three recommended starts.

Redefining the editorialization

Once someone scrolled past Get Started, the feed had to let them preview a category or jump into a trending list without losing their place. I connected Entry Point, View All, and What’s Hot into a single loop so switching categories took one chip tap.

  1. Entry PointSee All lands on its category
  2. View AllChips switch category
  3. What’s HotBack returns to Entry

Handoff design, Host Discover View, Oct 2022. The chip tap is inferred from the handoff’s chip states, game descriptions match their templates and counts are handoff design samples.

Make discovery worth browsing

Oooh’s catalog never sat still: games rotated in and out and seasonal events came and went. I put search and category chips at the top, with featured, trending and limited-time drops right below.

The detail I’m proudest of is the bookmark. One tap saved any game you enjoyed, and those saves grew into a Bookmarks section: a curated favorites page in a catalog that kept changing.

The hardest tension sat between expressive studio posters and a feed you could read. I kept the artwork and gave every card the same reading contract: a 12-character title, a 39-character premise, a yellow action and a bookmark. Fewer games per screen was worth it when each explained itself.

The studios' art stayed the same. The card did the explaining.

Giving people agency to remain curious

  • Discovery exploration

    Category shortcuts lead into Pet Tinder and Basketball Blitz spotlights.

  • An editorial interlude

    Mid-feed spotlights gave partner games room to pitch.

  • Room for a feature: A full-width spotlight lets a featured game show its art and hook.
  • A reason to notice it now: A Recently Updated badge tells returning hosts why it’s back.

Tapping a category shortcut filters the feed; the Pet Tinder interlude expands its premise inline, then returns to compact rows.

Let the team keep evolving it

Discovery only stayed clear if every weekly release fit the same card rules. When I arrived, design lived across 100+ files mid-move from Sketch to Figma, with drifting radii and spacing. I reverse engineered what had shipped and consolidated typography, color tokens, buttons, covers, empty states and seven card layouts into Oooh’s first shared consumer design system.

Our PMs and engineers didn’t need their hands held. They could inspect a file, change a variant type and mix and match the templates I’d set up without my guidance. Jason Donelly, my main PM, used it with me to design push notifications, and Charlie Helman used its component sets to plan the profile redesign.

Instead of letting every weekly studio game invent its own card layout, I locked one master card component to fixed title and premise bounds so new art dropped in without custom Figma layout work.

編集

ボタンを探して一日が終わるのは嫌なので、まずはみんなが使える部品を一か所に集めた。

The shared consumer design system

CARD FAMILY

From list row to card

Three rounds of the card. Host became Use, and the reward moved below the button. Play counts helped show what other people were trying. These comparisons use consistent bookmark icons and widths.

  1. List row

    Earliest rough, 1057 × 252 px @3x

    Squid Game × Red Light, Green Light poster art: the giant doll in front of pink-suited guards.Squid GameHow long can you survive? Red light, Green light in Squid Game.
    1. Title and descriptionThe row says what the game is. Its sample copy doubles as the writing rule.Key components: “info snippet”
    2. HostOne action, on the row.Key components: “host button”
    3. BookmarkSave for later, top right.
  2. Row-Title

    Component board, 1064 × 339 px @3x

    1. Plays and avatarsSocial proof arrives: a play count and a stack of avatars.Key components: “stats”
    2. UseHost becomes Use.
    3. XP on the posterThe reward rides on the poster art.
  3. Discover card cell

    Handoff, 1061 × 378 px @3x

    Pancake Stack poster artworkQ&AAn Oooh template that allows you to interact with your community in a Q&A format.+ 100 Hosts
    1. Hosts and playsThe avatars are labelled as hosts, and the play count follows them.
    2. BookmarkSave for later stays in the top corner.
    3. XP under UseThe reward moves off the poster, under the action.

Early card concepts, reusable components and the final handoff.

Card Family

Q&A poster art: pink and blue 3D letters spelling Q&A on a purple stage.

Q&A

An Oooh template that allows you to interact with your community in a Q&A format.

Tags: Trending, IRL

  1. Poster art unchangedThe original poster art.
  2. Title12 characters, one line. No room for a second.
  3. Description39 characters, then an ellipsis past 42.
  4. TagsCategory icons: Trending and IRL.

Handoff design, Host Discover View, Oct 2022.

CARD FAMILY

One component, six variants

One master card component powered the catalog. Three variants went into the final handoff, alongside two color explorations and an empty skeleton state.

  • Bookmarked

    Handoff, 1061 × 378 px @3x

    Friends replace hosts, after the play count, and Info becomes Learn More. The bookmark is filled.

  • Featured

    Handoff, 1061 × 378 px @3x

    Featured cards give people a starting point in Get Started. The pink surface sets them apart from the rest of the catalog.

Row_Card1, Property 1

  • DefaultHandoff
  • Card_BookmarkedHandoff
  • PinkHandoff
  • ColorVar_1Exploration
  • ColorVar_2Exploration
  • Variant5Empty card

Early card concepts, reusable components and the final handoff.

CARD FAMILY

Same parts, other densities

The same five card parts recombined across compact bookmark rows, parent-and-child prompt drawers, Recent cover tiles, and the Discover poster grid.

  • Compact row

    Simplified board, 1067 px wide, rows every 211 px @3x

    Compact rows make long bookmark lists easier to scan, keeping the game title and Use action close together.

  • Parent and children

    Component board, 1048 × 250 px @3x, children 257 × 257

    Browse reveals related games beneath the main card, so people can explore without losing their place in the list.

  • Cover tile

    Earliest rough, 375 × 644 px @3x

    Cover tiles put the game’s artwork first in the Recent row, with quick access to saving it for later.

  • Poster tile

    Handoff, Discover, 339 × 666 px @3x

    Poster tiles let people scan Discover visually. Activity and category cues add context without competing with the artwork.

Early card concepts, reusable components and the final handoff.

STATES

I designed Bookmarks across three density states: zero saved prompts, a single saved card with a recovery prompt below it, and a 20+ item list with a sticky search and sort header. The empty message also shared a component with the app’s error messages.

0 bookmarks, then Empty state

NO BOOKMARKS
FOUND

Looks like you haven’t bookmarked any prompts yet!
Bookmark your favorites by tapping the bookmark icon.

Find something to bookmark

  1. Text in the middleThe Content_Mid Txt component over ghost rows. The failure states below are its other variants.
  2. Prompt to browse“…the empty state should prompt them to browse, and have the text graphic / text sit in the middle.”

< 2 bookmarks, then Browse Prompts section

Bookmarked (1)

Find something to bookmark

  1. Browse prompts section“If user has < 2 bookmarks we show browse prompts section”

> 2 bookmarks, then Sticky search, count and filter

Bookmarked (20)

  1. Sticky above line“When user has lots of bookmarks they can scroll down. Search and Bookmarks title count + filter are sticky.”

Use Left and Right arrow keys to browse; Home and End reach the first and last items. You can also swipe or drag.

One status component, then Three failure variants

Txt_EmptyNoBookmarks, the empty state above, is the fourth variant and the only one a handoff story places. Tile labels read each variant’s name and copy. iOS and Android get separate sets with the same copy and emoji; only the emoji art differs, so your device draws its own here.

  • Data fails to loadTxt_TryAgain

    Something
    Went Wrong

    Looks like we couldn’t load in the proper data.
    Try again!

  • OfflineTxt_InternetOffline

    Looks like
    You’re OFFLINE

    Sorry we couldn’t load this page.

  • Page not foundTxt_404

    page not
    found

    Try searching again.

Discovery states and reusable content components.

Explore the Figma workboard and handoff
Explore the sharing, creator and reaction work

Design the paths around play

Most new players arrived from a link in a creator’s Instagram bio, Twitch chat, or group thread. Sending them straight to the App Store caused instant drop-off because they couldn’t see the round they were invited to play. I designed responsive web previews that showcased the round first, paired with dismissible Open in App banners and an Android SMS waitlist with inline phone validation.

Inside the app, I designed creator profiles, submission boosting so fans could attach a note to push their video up a creator’s queue, and the verified earnings portal. For push notifications, I held the prompt until high-intent moments (following a creator, publishing an Oooh, or taking first on a leaderboard) and designed an iOS Settings recovery card for anyone who had tapped Don’t Allow.

Asking for notification permissions on cold launch trains people to tap Don’t Allow. I held the prompt until someone followed a creator, published an Oooh, or took first place on a leaderboard.

From playing to reacting

Not every moment in a group thread calls for turning on your selfie camera. In user sessions, we saw players wanted to jump into a friend’s round on the bus, in class, or late at night when recording video felt like too much friction.

I designed Text Reacts so anyone could reply in seconds with a visual card: picking a backdrop or camera-roll photo, styling headlines above the keyboard, layering Oooh and GIPHY stickers, and posting with clear draft and error recovery.

Text Reacts

Inside the app, I designed Text Reacts so players could reply to a round with a custom card instead of a plain comment. You pick a backdrop or upload a photo, layer styled type or stickers from a combined Oooh and GIPHY tray, and post your take back to the feed.

I mapped the full authoring loop: compact and expanded sticker trays, an unsaved-changes guard when backing out, and inline toast feedback when a post succeeds or fails. For camera reactions, our user testing favored a bottom sheet where players pick whether their clip plays before the video, picture in picture, or after it.

I partnered with my PM, Charlie Helman, on the reaction and share trays so players could personalize how their clips appeared and we could track conversion from outbound deep links.

Choose a background

Start with a camera-roll photo or a solid color swatch.

Make it your own

Typeface modes and color swatches sit right above the keyboard.

Add a sticker

First-party Oooh art and GIPHY share one searchable tray.

Showing create a react, compact trays.

A clearer path to play

We measured the new flow in Jupyter and Tableau: more players moved from the catalog into gameplay and posting, and our D1, D7 and D30 cohorts showed higher retention and LTV. It landed well with our CEO. Oooh was later sunset and absorbed into Scopely for Monopoly Go.

If I did it again, I’d aim for better coherence and compression. I’d run tighter critiques that put the user first, and I’d audit the app and align the whole team before building the system, instead of reverse engineering it from fragments.

TEAM

Founders: Colin Carrier (former Twitch CSO) and Paco Viciana (former Disney Interactive VP). Design Director: Keely Portsmouth. PMs: Jason Donelly, Charlie Helman, Nick, and Marissa.

Thanks to Colin Carrier for taking a chance on me, and to Paco.

ABOUT

Matt wearing snow goggles in the mountains
この映像の大半を撮影してくれたのは、JULIAN MARSHALL。1か月もの間、僕の馬鹿な振る舞いに付き合ってくれた。20年以上の付き合いになる彼を友人と呼べることに、ずっと感謝している。

I’m Matt Stenquist, a Product Design Engineer and former professional snowboarder. I started coding at nine, shipped modded hardware and games by 16, and turned pro by 22. A few broken bones and a gold tooth later, I design and code consumer apps, Figma component systems, and AI developer tools from scratch.

LEARN MORE