Social tools for gamers of the future. A video and voice chat app that enables users to use emojis and sounds to play games with friends.
The Role
I joined Hamul as the sole designer in June 2021, taking on the responsibility for the experience strategy and design of the desktop app. Our team was small, consisting of our CEO and six engineers. I guided the design roadmap, crafted the look and feel, managed the UX work, and ensured the production of all major deliverables.
The CHALLENGE
When I joined, Hamul had just launched with the bare minimum for video-to-video communication. I had two main objectives: to enhance functionality and usability beyond our competitors and to build a unique brand identity and design from the ground up.
The pressure to move fast was intense, as I had to rapidly develop the design infrastructure while simultaneously designing and delivering for a live product. I had to approach my design work with confidence and expertise to keep up with the rapid pace of development.
The MVP LAUNCH in 2020 December consisted of a launcher and video chat
The Approach
Defining the space
As a small startup our research often relied on scrappy tactics, drawing from past experiences and competitive analysis. By examining the current market and identifying our unique positioning, we defined our product's North Star which guided our planning and roadmapping.
As gaming continues to grow in popularity, today’s tools are insufficient, disconnected, or simply don’t exist for a seamless group gaming experience. Most tools fall into one of three categories:
Communication-first: Current tools are centered around traditional communication methods like texting or audio calls.
Game studio or game-specific: Switching from game to game is cumbersome, and the social cost of moving gaming connections is high.
Targeted at hardcore gamers: These tools cater to hardcore gamers who can navigate technical hurdles and extensive settings.
The Discovery
Beyond Replication
In the broader landscape of social communication we understood that simply replicating competitor features wasn’t a strategic move for us. Hamul had a unique strength in its ability to prioritize social first in a way that no other gaming communication platform could. This distinct advantage became our key differentiator in a fast-evolving market, driving us to innovate and focus on advancing social communication.
User Personas gave us the focus needed to prioritize and shape our early roadmapping. They were essential in understanding our users' needs, behaviors, and pain points, allowing us to tailor design decisions to real world scenarios. By creating personas that represented our core audience, gamers who value social interaction, self-expression, and seamless group experience we could better anticipate their needs and ensure that Hamul’s features resonated with them.
Throughout the project, personas helped align the team by grounding discussions in specific user archetypes. This made it easier to communicate with investors and ensure that everyone from design to engineering worked toward the same user-driven objectives.
The VISION
Fostering Connection
Hamul differentiated itself as a social-first platform that empowered self-expression and fosters relationships during group gaming. Hamul focused on these categories:
Social-first: focusing on the connections between players, deepening relationships before, during, and after the game. We aim to create tools that facilitate wholesome moments, bringing people closer together through gaming.
Empower self-expression: Identity is crucial for many gamers. We want to unlock more ways for players to express themselves through non-traditional tools and customization options. Our goal is to help players discover and share their identity, adapting to the ups and downs of their gaming experience.
Gaming-focused: Our solutions are designed to meet the needs of gamers. Hamul offers the flexibility to be used across various games, allowing quick access and seamless integration, regardless of the game being played.
Together: Hamul is built for the group gaming experience. We prioritize gaming with others over solo play, believing that some of the best friendships are forged through gaming. Our platform helps sustain these friendships, no matter which games are popular today.
The Solution
Hamul facilitated seamless connections, socialization, and the building of friendships through gaming. Users could create public or private parties where friends could join and hang out. The platform fostered strong connections through cooperative streaks, power-ups, profile tagging and many more.
Join parties that matter to you
Homepage is catered to you through friend activity, or gaming interests.
Communicate with friends
Stay connected to the action, whether through direct messaging, audio, or video chat.
Send friends Power-up
Send your friend a simple hello, emoji or Rick Roll, or try to mess them up with a distraction.
Draw on shared screens
Interact with shared screen streaming with live drawing
The Framework
Growing up in the 90’s I have fond memories of staying up late with friends during sleep overs and playing video games on the couch together. It was those raw group emotions of either winning or losing together that you only get with proximity. I wanted to recreate that sense of togetherness in the modern digital age.
Questions I asked myself:
How do you bring a sense of closeness and interactions, like those only close friends share in real life, into a digital platform?
How do you build a platform where strangers can come together and build meaningful relationships?
It felt logical to tackle familiar communication foundations like messaging and voice audio, but that’s not what Hamul was trying to represent. We wanted to solve for social-first gaming communication.
When gaming together on a couch, you'd cheer for your friend if your group was playing cooperatively. Similarly, if you just beat your friend in Street Fighter, you'd feel compelled to showboat and playfully knock them down a notch. It’s those emotional reactions and the ability to interact with friends that I believe was the secret sauce. I proposed developing tools and frameworks that enable users to interact with each other in innovative ways, creating a sense of proximity and social connection as if they were gaming together in the real world.
Principles
Fun over Formality.
Prioritize creating an environment that fosters joy and laughter over more formal approach.
Impact over Incremental.
Deliver unique features that captivate users, over incremental improvements.
Simplicity over Complexity.
Focus on intuitive user experience over advanced features that complicate interfaces.
Community over Individual.
Emphasize collaborative community building experiences over individual journeys.
UXR
As a small team without a dedicated UXR team, one of the quickest ways to get data was user testing competitor video and voice communication apps, messenger apps and games with multiplayer systems.
I had access to live user feedback whenever I needed it through the Hamul platform. As developers, we were fairly well-known and in good relationship within the community. Users soon started to see it as a badge of honor when a Hamul employee would drop in and out of public parties to ask questions about the platform. I would sit in and ask questions in public parties to observe and understand how our users were interacting with our product.
“Sometimes I just want to hangout. I might be watching youtube while my friends are playing. I still want to socialize but not play.”
My assumption that users wanted to feel close to each other, much like the experience of couch gaming were in line. The research I conducted was invaluable in supporting my designs.
Start a party!
One of my earliest design challenges was building a closed loop for producers and actors to game together. Producers of parties were the most important triggers that spun social fly wheels with friends. We had majority of our users awaiting and searching for public parties to join, but the act to create and start a party was high friction.
Playing games with people is hard. It’s hard to get two players in the same place at the same time, especially on PC. Gaming is a synchronous type of communication, which inherently makes coordination for 2 or more people harder. People start parties, but don’t get into a party with others, therefore never experiencing our value proposition.
My earliest design success to motivate users to start creating parties was adding a online presence inside the chat log itself. Users could see in real-time if a member of that chat was online and ready to play. Just that small education of allowing users to know when friends were active online rose our conversion rate of party 2+ DAU by 8% . Our conversion in the funnel went from 15% up to 23%.
A technical hurdle arose when discussing the implementation of what I called "sticky notifications" for online presence. It was expensive to check the online status of every user on the backend every second. Through discussions and alignment, we navigated this challenge by implementing actions that provided high efficacy indicators of a user's online status. Specifically, we added the online presence ping to the payload of sending a message.
One of the advantages of working in a small team is that decisions are made quickly and decisively. Each week, we constantly re-evaluated our approach with new data to stay aligned with our north star goals.
Messaging
I was responsible for building the messaging system from the ground up, navigating numerous discussions about ephemeral versus recorded message logs, as well as weighing available resources against ROI. My assumption was that both types of messaging were essential: ephemeral messaging for public parties to encourage meeting new people and forming connections, and private messaging for long-term users to develop deeper, more meaningful relationships.
Due to tight timelines, I had to rapidly develop an MVP for our messaging system. The reality of messaging is that it's a well-established construct, users quickly notice if the experience is more cumbersome than what's available in the market.
To address this, my initial focus was on achieving a core messaging UX. Once that was in place, the next milestone would be to incorporate additional features like deep links, attachments, and GIFs. Achieving feature parity also involved addressing challenges such as managing pagination for 1,000+ messages, ensuring smooth interaction with both past and new messages, and optimizing message navigation.
Homepage
Producers (party creators) played a crucial role in driving retention and converting DAUs. Our focus was on guiding new users to our value proposition as quickly as possible, which led us to aggressively highlight the most popular public parties with clear calls to action. Additionally, we collaborated with popular streamers who were associated with the top games on our platform. This strategy initially resulted in significant growth in both DAUs and WAU. However, the high costs and scheduling challenges associated with hiring streamers eventually made this approach unsustainable, and we had to deprioritize it.
I assumed that prioritizing actions leading to synchronous party engagement over asynchronous activities like scheduling or daily drips was inline with our goals and principles. To support this, we designed the homepage to reorganize itself based on user interaction. The implementation was straightforward: features that were used more frequently moved up, while those used less often moved down. The Daily Drip announcement bar had a unique functionality—if a user ignored it for 14 days, it would be permanently hidden. The only design constraint I implemented was ensuring the hero banner always remained at the top, providing consistency for all users when opening the app.
Profile tagging your friends
A profile represents so much more than just a user’s information—it’s a way to showcase individuality and social presence. It’s an opportunity for friends to see what you’ve been up to and serves as a gateway to deeper connections.
The idea of unstructured content, where users could tag and decorate their friends' spaces, became a key element of social interaction. This act itself triggered a cycle of notifications and a desire to reciprocate, much like Facebook’s classic "poke" feature.
Design Feedback
I hosted open design review meetings once a week, where any team member could join to provide feedback, test prototypes, and view the latest design work. These meetings were typically organic, though we occasionally scheduled specific reviews or design kick-offs with engineers. They provided a valuable opportunity for the team to ask questions and align on product goals.
Given the small, autonomous nature of our team, we developed close relationships, fostering a strong sense of camaraderie and a willingness to support each other. One unexpected benefit was involving family members or spouses in testing the product. They brought their own unique expertise and insights, further enriching the development process.
These design review meetings were a highlight of my journey at Hamul. As the sole designer, I realized how much I missed the collaborative critique process and working alongside others with the same expertise. When everyone is heads down, working in silos to keep things moving, it’s refreshing to know that your team members are there to support you.
Prototypes
Prototypes were essential for gathering rapid feedback, allowing me to quickly course-correct and keep moving forward. They served as a simple yet effective way to demonstrate interaction and UX concepts. During engineering hand-offs, I preferred to present prototypes as high level broad UX, followed by detailed UX flows showcasing edge/corner cases.
The EXecution
Gallery of Hamul.
Product Marketing
…did we just go viral?
The majority of Hamul's new users were acquired through word of mouth and organically. We spent very little on ads to lower CAC while maintaining a steady stream of data. The platform was in a functional state, and our metrics were approaching our target goals for 14+ day retention. This put us in a position to explore creative ways to bring in more users.
The team decided that producing a sizzle video was a promising route due to its low resource cost and the ability to outsource production. I contributed to the storyboards and wrote the script for the video, which reached 3.7 million views!
Seeing results
4
AVG PARTY SIZE
205m
USERS AVG TIME IN PARTY
10k+
DAU
40M+
POWER-UPS USED
28%
14 DAY RETENTION
96%
USERS PLAYED WEEKLY WITH FRIENDS
Impact
🎉🎉🎉 We were acquired! 🎉🎉🎉
When I joined Hamul in its early stages I leaned towards optimism, setting dream like goals to maintain high morale and momentum. However, the reality of Hamul's fast-paced environment meant that many of my decisions were driven by immediate constraints and limited resources. As the project evolved my approach shifted to one of hyperrealism.
Despite the challenges, I genuinely believe Hamul was on the cusp of major success when we were acquired. Had we continued, I’m confident Hamul would have solidified its place in the market. I'm deeply grateful to the team and my coworkers for making this journey an unforgettable experience.