Challenge

Rooster Teeth Productions, the makers of Red vs Blue and RWBY (the longest running web series of all time), have nearly 10M YouTube subscribers and 5.6B video views. But since long before YouTube, their website RoosterTeeth.com was the home to a engaged young community that their founders consider the secret to the company's success.

When they called Slide UX, the site was in desperate need of a refresh. What had started as a garage pastime for its creators has snowballed into a burgeoning international community of subscribers who spent thousands of hours watching video and chatting with one another online. The site was fragile due to years of band-aid updates. And it wasn’t yet mobile-responsive.

What We Did

We started with formative interviews to understand the Rooster Teeth community; we spoke with social media lurkers, site lurkers, power users, recruiters, forum users, and out-of-date users. Our research revealed trends in site usage, pain points, and insights into why some users stayed engaged while others abandoned.

From there, we crafted mobile-responsive wireframes and visual designs for a new site intended to draw users in.

We provided the HTML and CSS for a newly mobile-responsive site overhaul that left the team and community delighted.

Results

Designing for such a connected audience turned out to be a thrill; watching for the community’s Twitter response on launch day had us on the edge of our seats.

Happily, fans were ecstatic that they could now enjoy the site from their mobile devices. They appreciated new features that arose from our research (like Watch Later) and old features that we’d brought back due to popular request. The community blasted the RoosterTeeth dev team with kind tweets.

In post-project feedback, stakeholders from Rooster Teeth gave Slide UX glowing ratings, and our work continued with post-launch QA and refinements suggested by – you guessed it – the RoosterTeeth community!

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