Listening to Community, Streamlining to Engage … Or, How I Spent My Summer at Kast

Given all the changes to the video streaming and video chat ecosystem this past summer, losing at least one company from the mix, everyone here at Kast envisioned something essential — there could be a watch party solution that kept the best elements of well-loved but defunct platforms in play, but that also opened up a universe of possibilities around live-sharing.

Already, we’d been talking to the community about Kast’s watch-party approaches. The key in the weeks following all those changes, back in July, was to listen — actively and responsively listen. Here’s a bit of what has happened a result of doing just that, and it’s made for an incredible summer!

Community engagement motivates a faster product turnaround. While we’d already begun adding watch-party functionality to Kast experiences, new feedback, especially from the former Rabbit community, drove us to focus on something newer still to our platform. It was time to add the ability to host a watch party and participate in a text chat, all in a single-screen setup. It was majorly inspiring to see these learnings create even more momentum around our development cycle. Typically, a rollout like this one could entail a two to three-week process. Instead, we made it happen in one. Massive shout-out to BrooklynAnnarkie, one of our standout community favs — she offered invaluable insight into use cases and wants and needs out there among kasters.

Fresh input puts the focus on parties. Part of Kast’s legacy design was the idea that a single group would host different kinds of events. You started a group first. You hosted parties within it. On the community side, however, we discovered this summer that requiring the creation of a group before launching a party was not optimal for most of the community members. They just wanted to get underway, and not think about what their group would be, or what the difference between a group or a party was in the first place. Clarity! Thanks again to all our kasters’ feedback and ideas. Now that we’ve exercised a bit of radical simplification, parties are at the heart of every kast. Once we streamlined the system to a parties-only approach, we saw a 20% jump in engagement. The lesson there is, when it comes to user experiences, keeping things simple makes for happier math.

One of the takeaways I’d like to emphasize is that it’s critical to optimize in ways that serve the many, but that still acknowledge the smaller segments of your community. As a general rule of thumb, design experiences so that they align very closely with 80% of your community. At the same time, make sure that the other 20% can still do what they need to get done.

The point is, different people add Kast to numerous different use cases. The platform should offer dynamic flexibility, but optimizing the experience for a 20% slice of the community might make it unnecessarily complicated for the other 80%. Strive to eliminate friction at scale. After that, address the focused dialogues with the additional users who need something specific.

So, as we fine-tune the Kast timeline of products and developments, watch this space for more reports from the Chief Experience desk. Welcome to Kast and thanks for working with us as we improve your watch party and online hangout space. We’ll see you in the stream!