Designing a Scalable Live Q&A Experience
From research to first launch milestone—building a tool that empowers real-time audience participation.
The Team
1 PM
3 Designers
4 Developers
My Role
Researcher
Designer
Platform
Desktop
Timeline
01. 2025 - Ongoing
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.
Key Challenges
It never get to development stage due to the complexity of this project, missing components, tight deadline.
2020 design
2020 design
2022 design
Customer Insights
“More than five of our customers are repurposing our commenting tool as a live Q&A feature.” - Customer Success Team
Final decision
After several rounds of discussion with the engineering team and product manager regarding the previous challenges, we aligned on:
Define MVP features based on user research to ensure we're prioritizing what matters most to users.
Build a new front-end codebase for the product, which means the design team will begin creating new components and work toward establishing a new design system.
Research to MVP
Conducted semi-structured interviews, employing a blend of targeted prototype feedback and exploratory conversations, to gather actionable insights and inform iterative feature design.
Interview with stakeholders
Interviewed with 5 external stakeholders and using AI to generated the summary from the interviews
Create user persona
Created three major user personas based on the interview results
Define the MVP
Defined key actions are expected to taken during each stage based on user personas, and shared it with PM to help him creating user stories.
Design Process
Our design process began with defining the overall user flow, which took about a month of collaboration across design, product, and engineering. We then moved into prioritization and sprint planning, aligning on the most critical features to tackle first. Through iterative design sprints, we refined solutions based on feedback and evolving constraints, with each sprint delivering tangible results to validate with stakeholders. Throughout the process, I maintained detailed documentation to ensure a smooth handoff to developers and to support future scalability of the design system.
Step 1. User flow
The initial user flows included three main user types: Host, Guest Host, and Audience. However, due to technical and time constraints, the final flow was streamlined to support only two user types.
Step 2. Priority planning
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.
Step 3. Design iterations
The 1st sprint design is completed with host users can answer questions, and audience users can post them.
Host Flow
Audience Flow
Step 4. Components documentation
Building all key components from scratch, established a foundation with a new design library.
Debating the why
There were several instances where I had debates with other teams or team members over smaller design details before handing off the work to developers.
PM thinks
"The answer and reply buttons look confusing to me, user might don't know the difference."
Design team said
"Ok, we will take it to test with the host users."
Test result
I designed and tested a prototype with three external stakeholders, all of whom successfully understood and completed the reply and answer flow, indicating strong usability and clarity in the interaction design.
External stakeholder said
"This is great! This is exactly what I am expecting"
Final Handoff
Hosted meetings between design team and PM engineering team to go through design and documentation, performed design QA for each ticket
Design Sprint 2 - Work in progress
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