Advanced Creation Mode - Rec Room
The Maker Pen is Rec Room’s multi-platform creation tool, used by both end-users and developers to create player content. Its usability and power are critical to ensuring a steady flow of content for Rec Room players.
As lead designer of in-app creation tools, my goal was to evaluate the creator ecosystem, develop a strategy to improve the Maker Pen, and create a pilot UX to validate key strategic hypotheses.
RESEARCH
I partnered with the data team to establish creator segmentation and assess the health of our creator ecosystem. We discovered that top creators made up just 0.0004% of the player base—far below the 1% benchmark for a thriving community as well as a trend that 75% of all creators were on the VR platform only. This highlighted an urgent need to improve our creation tools to better support and grow our creator base.
I partnered with the consumer insights team to launch monthly in-app surveys to understand creator struggles. The feedback revealed that the Maker Pen was too complex for novices and too cumbersome for veterans, with trends worsening over time.
Research Insights and Hypotheses:
The Maker Pen UX, designed primarily for VR, favors that platform. Customizing UX to each platform's strengths could boost engagement on non-VR systems.
The current Maker Pen struggles to meet the needs of both novice and veteran creators, suggesting a need for fundamental improvements.
First define the ideal advanced tool experience, then simplify it for broader accessibility.
Selecting a platform with a smaller creator community (PC) minimizes disruption to existing workflows.
IDEATION
During UX ideation, I led brainstorming sessions to enhance the PC experience for emerging top creators. This strategy not only addresses the shortage of top creators quickly but also benefits internal content creators who rely on the PC tool.
PROTOTYPING & DEVELOPMENT
I led prototyping efforts, writing design specs, providing timely UX feedback, and conducting internal playtests to gather insights from content creators. In total, over 40 new features and improvements were added to the UX, all completed in 3 months by a strike team of 4 engineers.
TESTING & DELIVERY
The tool, dubbed Advanced Creation Mode, was a significant success for both external creators and Rec Room as a company. Key achievements of this initiative include:
UX tool confusion was reduced by removing 50% of existing tools while maintaining functionality.
Statsig experiments showed that creation efficiency improved by 150% for external creators.
Creator focus shifted dramatically toward creation vs navigating menus (menu interactions were reduced by 75%).
Within 2 weeks, 100% of internal Rec Room creators had incorporated Advanced Creation Mode into their workflows, boosting creation velocity.
Creator segmentation data became the standard lens for evaluating all feature work within the Creator Organization.
The new in-app survey tool became the standard tool for gathering user feedback regarding all delivered features into the Rec Room app.