The writer's portal is the companion website that allows creators to bring their stories to the Episode platform.
The writer's portal launched in 2013, allowing users to create their own stories for the Episode platform by writing scripts, creating characters and creating outfits. Since then Episode has continued to push the boundaries of interactive storytelling by developing new tools and features for content creation.
As the writer's portal began to age usability issues became more apparent and it fell behind in keeping up with Episode's updated styling. We set a new goal to go back and solidify our foundation by finding and targeting creator pain points, improving site usability and bringing consistency to the brand across platforms.
The Episode app.
Old writer's portal home page.
I spoke with creators to find out what they felt were the biggest issues facing them when creating stories and finding success on the Episode platform. Creators expressed their key frustrations as:
To address these issues we looked at three key areas.
Overhauling the payments program to make it easier for writers to qualify and track their progress to qualifying.
Expand the ways creators can earn money from their stories.
Allow creators more transparency into the success of their story.
The writer payments program allows qualifying creators to earn money from the success of their stories.
Since the initial launch, the requirements for qualifying for the program hadn't been updated to account for the increased competitiveness of the platform and the inclusion of gem choices in user stories. This meant it was increasingly difficult for creators to qualify. I also wanted to address pain points around understanding how close creators were to qualifying for the program.
With the new requirements going into place there would now be two different ways creators could qualify, purely with reads or a mix of reads and gems spent. My focus when redesigning the lock screen was to make it clear to creators the ways they could qualify and create a visual indicator of how close they were to achieving those goals.
New writer payments page
After releasing these changes we saw an increase in the number of stories qualifying for payments and creators felt they had a clearer understanding where they were in the process and how to achieve their goals.
Previously the only option available to creators for adding additional monetization to their stories was to add gem choices. This meant creators often were locking content behind a pay gate or were using this to create a donate button.
Gem choices were not popular with players and creators alike. Players didn't like gated content and were unclear whether purchasing would benefit their favorite creators and creators didn't want their players to feel like they weren't getting the full story experience without paying.
I surveyed players about what they felt would be valuable and make them want to spend to support their favorite creators. Of the top features I then surveyed creators about what they would be most interested in adding to their stories
Creators were interested in a number of features they could provide their users.
We began exploring two ideas, Early Access and Skip-the-Wait. Early access would allow creators to release new episodes behind a paywall for a limited time. This allowed dedicated readers to spend gems to access content early before it was released to everyone. Skip-the-Wait added a short wait for players between episodes that could be skipped by spending gems.
We ran a beta test of these features with a small group of authors. The authors who enabled these features saw boosts in their revenue and generally positive comments from players.
Many creators updated the frequency during the beta test.
Creators expressed wanting more control over Skip-the-Wait and the ability to choose the frequency for their stories. So we tested several options and included the best performing as options for creators in the final release.
Upon release players noted that they felt they were happy to support creators in this way and creators had a simpler way to allow their fans to support them. We saw a 10x improvement in monetization on user stories which meant creators who added Early Access or Skip-the-Wait saw significant increases in their revenue.
Publishing popup for enabling new gem features available for creators on the writer’s portal.
Previously, creators were only shown their total reads and overall/genre ranks. This information gave a high level overview of how a creator's story was doing but lacked detail.
We determined that we needed to provide creators with more data so they could see how each action impacted their stories. This project was like nothing that had ever done before on Episode and required building a brand new system from scratch that would be understandable by creators of all ages and experience levels.
I worked closely with creators and our product team to determine what metrics would be most helpful and what data we had to inform those figures.
I began sketching out different ways to visualize the data. Since age ranges for creators vary greatly it was important that the data was both useful and presented in a way that all creators could understand.
I worked with a group of creators to get feedback and improve upon designs.
Interactive prototype I created and tested with users.
Feedback from users asked for more granular details on reads and gems spent in their stories so these were both added before beginning a beta test with a small group of creators.
During the beta I made additional adjustments adding additional context and clarifications to the dashboard.
Community reception to the dashboard was very positive and creators noted they felt more informed about how their story was performing and better understood how to make meaningful changes to improve. Monitoring of logs matched with this feedback, showing that creators using the dashboard were seeing boosts in their retention and gem metrics.
The addition of all of these features allowed us to help more creators find success on the Episode platform.
Throughout development of these features I ensured we included usability improvements, layout, and styling updates. This also included additional quality of life improvements like redesigning the home page.
Episode writer's portal home page after redesign.
A sampling of some other projects I've brought to the writer's portal.
Redesign our help page organization to use a hub and spoke model, creating a central location for users to find help.
With the introduction of dynamically colored assets I worked with our art team to introduce a new way to select assets with multiple color variations.