Streamlabs Desktop’ Ultimate Summer Bod Part 1 — Onboarding
Summer is finally here, and at Streamlabs, we’ve been working hard to get Streamlabs Desktop into a summer bod. We’re in the process of revamping our entire user experience this summer, and we want to be sure you are ready for what’s coming to Streamlabs Desktop every step of the way. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be rolling out a series of blog posts outlining our process, reasoning, and background on these changes to make sure everyone knows exactly what’s coming and why. I’m Sean, a software engineer working on the Streamlabs Desktop team, and I’ll be going over the first of multiple user experience changes that we’ll be rolling out this summer: our onboarding flow.
Download Streamlabs Desktop HERE.
Streamlabs Desktop is a free streaming software providing an all in one solution for live streaming. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for anyone to start live streaming. From an initial setup perspective, Streamlabs Desktop can save nearly 12 hours of setup time, but it can still be an overwhelming initial experience for both new streamers and OBS veterans.
We’ve redesigned our onboarding process that metaphorically rolls out a red carpet to new users of Streamlabs Desktop, giving them a tailored and curated experience and showing them what they care about. Here’s how we did it:
As a new user booting up Streamlabs Desktop for the first time or even an experienced OBS streamer, getting started with our software isn’t easy. New users are presented with a ton of choices and technical jargon they aren’t familiar with, and seasoned OBS vets have to slog through a bunch of steps they don’t care about. We were taking a one-size-fits-all approach to onboarding our new users, and as a result, we ended up with an experience that wasn’t tailored to any user group. Our solution is to make the onboarding process smarter.
Making the onboarding process better
We’re now asking users to tell us what kind of user they are, so we can tailor their experience appropriately. We broke down onboarding into two distinct flows: one for users brand new to streaming and another for users who have already been using OBS. New users will only go through a few quick steps — we automatically optimize their settings based on their machine and they choose a theme. That’s it. They’ll be off to the races with the basics of streaming already set up for them.
For existing streamers and OBS users, it’s just as simple. Importing from OBS will send over all of your existing scene collections, scenes, sources, and settings. But Streamlabs Desktop boasts several powerful features that aren’t available in regular OBS.
We analyze your setup to recommend some of those features that we think could help take your stream to the next level.
- Only have one monitor? Try out our new in-game overlay so you can read chat and your events while playing a game.
- Enjoy making IRL content? We recommend using Facemask donations to boost your tipping volume and make some pretty hilarious moments.
We’ll continue adding new features to our recommended list to make sure each streamer is aware of the awesome things they can do with Streamlabs Desktop.
This is only the first of several major user experience changes that are coming to Streamlabs Desktop. We are keeping all of you up to date with what’s happening behind the scenes, so stay tuned for more news in this series! In the next entry, we’ll be exploring how and why we’re giving the main Streamlabs Desktop tabs (Editor and Live) a major facelift.
Download Streamlabs Desktop.
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