Designing a Scalable Live Q&A Experience
From research to first launch milestone—building a tool that empowers real-time audience participation.
My Role
Platform
Desktop
Timeline
Project Overview
The Live Q&A tool is a real-time audience engagement solution that enables publishers to host interactive, AMA-style sessions directly on their sites. It’s designed to help existing clients deepen community engagement and serves as a compelling entry point for prospects who may not be using our commenting tools but are interested in exploring live, interactive experiences.
Our existing customers trying to use commenting tool as AMA.
The Challenge & Opportunity
The Live Q&A tool had been on the backlog for three years, with two rounds of design completed by the previous team, but it never made it into development due to scope challenges. Recently, it gained traction with leadership, driven by increasing client demand as many tried to repurpose our commenting tool for AMA-style sessions. The key business objectives for the tool are:
> Drive deeper audience engagement through real-time, interactive conversations.
> Simplify moderation and event setup for editorial teams.
> Provide scalable solutions for large sessions and multiple hosts.
> Enable event promotion and user notifications to boost participation.
> Unlock monetization opportunities via sponsored or subscription-only events.
Research & Discovery
Conducted semi-structured interviews, employing a blend of targeted prototype feedback and exploratory conversations, to gather actionable insights and inform iterative feature design.
I invested two weeks and 6 hours into conducting 5 user interviews, which directly resulted in defining the core features for the MVP.
AI-Generated Summary Points:
Insights from the initial user interviews shaped our understanding of target user types and major personas.
Defining the MVP
Interview insights informed the creation of a chart prioritizing client needs, supported by direct quotations.
Design Process
The initial flows with major three user types: Host, Guest Host, Audience.
Following discussions with the Project Manager and engineering team, it was determined that the addition of a new user type is beyond the scope of the current MVP timeline. Consequently, we will proceed with the existing user account type, consolidating host and guest host functionality. The revised user flow, depicting these two user types, is presented below.
In collaboration with engineering, we segmented the MVP flows into three phases. To adhere to our timeline, the first design sprint is being completed within one week.
In a week we have accomplished below design work:
Analyzing Competitor Screenshots for Design Insights
Building all key components from scratch, established a foundation with a new design library.
Header
Based on user interviews, Host users prioritize the header over the timestamp. To improve information hierarchy, we applied a heading style to the title for greater emphasis and reformatted the time into an all-caps chip style for better readability.
Status Chip
Host users emphasized the need for clearer event statuses. The new status chip component improves visibility by using distinct icons and background colors, allowing users to quickly understand the event’s status at a glance. (We only have LIVE for Priority 1, adding SCHEDULED, ENDED in the future)
Navigation Tab
Based on user interviews, we've identified a need for better navigation to improve readability in AMA conversations.
By enhancing the navigation tab with better spacing and bolder text, we not only make the interface more user-friendly but also create a scalable design that can accommodate three additional tabs for Hosts (Admin users) in the future.
Answer Button
We refined the 'Answered' button by making it an inline primary button with an icon and primary font style, ensuring it stands out as a key CTA for Host (Admin) users. This adjustment enhances the UI structure, prioritizing one of the Host's most frequent actions—marking answers—especially for solo Host users managing the event.
Read more
It appears to be more conventional to have expansion action on the left, likely as text is left aligned.
Highlighted Answer
The answer will be highlighted and pinned at the top of the thread, ensuring clear visibility for both the Host and the Audience while navigating through discussions.
Answer to...
We are currently treating the Answer to @Username as label not a button that opens the whole thread.
We don’t have current data in the dashboard for this comment_replies_load button.
Answering Thread
The idea for the answering thread here to to combine Answer and Reply and make them less confuse to the host users what are the differences for these two buttons.
Need further user testing to prove this concept
Question Container
The new comment container has a more modern and rounded input containers and constant button style
First Milestone Outcome
As a result, the first milestone design is complete: host users can answer questions, and audience users can post them.
The “Answer” and “Reply” button conflict:
Final Handoff Checklist:
Host Flow
Audience Flow
Next Steps - Priority 2
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