Thane Woidan
Email meI do software product management, UX, and engineering.
I'm happiest when dedicated to projects I believe in.
Where I’ve worked
Product management, software engineering, and UX at SteelSeries
2013 - present
Web engineering at Nerdery
2012 - 2013
Frontend web engineering at cleverbridge
2009 - 2012
Some of my best projects
Moments
Product owner, engineer
A gaming clipping app for PC. It saves short replay clips of game footage via shortcut, or automatically at important occasions in certain games.
SteelSeries was looking to create software-only offerings to build a new pool of users, so we dove into creating a clipping app.
Main use case
While SteelSeries had software for its gaming hardware, they wanted to expand the user base with software-only projects. The software director and I focus tested a number of ideas for software apps that might be interesting enough to gamers to use on a regular basis.
Based on the test results, we decided to build a gaming video clipping app. While many clipping apps for PC gaming exist, none had nailed the use case of getting clips easily into private chats or a wide range of social platforms, and surveys showed this is where the majority of gamers wanted their clips to go.
That's where we focused the Moments UX: getting short trimmed clips shared into social platforms as simply and flexibly as possible.
Insights from feedback
We started designing a prototype to vet the clipping tech and a primary UX flow.
During numerous Alpha and Beta phases, we gathered and implemented tons of user feedback. I did in-person UX interviews, surveys, and spoke directly to users about features and bugs in a private Discord. Several A/B tests also helped the team make big technical and design decisions.
Select insights I uncovered:
- Largest barrier for saving clips: gamers would simply forget, and would only realize later they wanted one
- Users were weary to connect their social accounts to upload clips, but had little hesitation using drag & drop
- Allowing custom shortcuts to save a clip was essential -- users had strong and widely varied feelings on ideal shortcuts
- Secondary use cases: users wanted to save replay clips to closely review in-game technique or events, or just keep an archive of memories with their buddies
Incorporating feedback
With the main flow refined by the betas, the team and I prioritized and addressed as many of the insights as possible before release. Here's a few:
- Can't remember to clip? Games like CS:GO could now trigger saving interesting clips automatically, based on in-game events
- Added embedded text captions, allowing users to give their clip context & increasing likelihood of sharing
- Clips could now be favorited, and deleted in batches
- Games from Windows Store and the Xbox app were now detected and clippable, important for GamePass
- Links to "Open file location" were added in multiple locations to increase flexibility for where gamers could utilize clips
Launching
Moments was the headliner of SteelSeries' new software platform called GG. This platform was created to also incorporate Engine, the established software for configuring hardware devices.
For the official launch, I closely monitored usage data and errors while our planned updates rolled out gradually. This data let us react quickly react to any unforseen consequences, and ensure hardware owners were still getting the same experience.
Checkout on steelseries.com
UX, engineer
I designed and coded the frontend of the e-tail process on steelseries.com.
The design closely followed industry ecommerce standards, was fine tuned with A/B tests, and has stood the test of time.
Design phase
The checkout update project had three main goals: update the flow for modern ecommerce, be flexible for A/B tests, and adhere to Baymard Institute standards.
The challenge of the design process was combining internal knowledge of how to sell our products with these standards.
Cart system
I introduced a dynamic cart system. When adding a product, the cart slides out from the right.
This is a powerful system. Inside this cart overlay we added suggested products, showed value-adds, or allowed users to check out immediately if they were ready.
Checkout process
The checkout process closely followed Baymard guidelines, and referenced examples from other successful modern checkouts that who shipped physical products.
The checkout maintained the cart on the right, and launched with different layouts optimized for different global regions.
A/B testing
I introduced a new feature behind an A/B test shortly after launch: on the 'order complete' page, customers who purchased without accounts could add a password to create an account immediately.
It dramatically helped to gain more repeat customers without being obtrusive in any way.
Custom mousepad app
Engineer, design, skunkworks guy
Really fun project. Full realization of a custom mousepad program, where the user could configure an uploaded image and get a high-quality mousepad with the image on it.
I designed and created the frontend of the app, vetted print quality and logistics, ran beta phases, and even shipped the first few orders myself.
I do other stuff too, of course.
I love exploring Earth with my wife whenever possible. I’m dad to a friendly skeleton dog, and have a hot sauce side hustle.
