How to design a live broadcast room? Live broadcast room design guide!

Live streaming has long been the fastest and most powerful way to monetize in the Internet industry. In China, the live streaming industry originated in 2005 and exploded in 2016. It has been less than 20 years since then, but during this period it has undergone many major changes, including from voice to video, from group dating to personal shows, from PC to mobile, and from internet celebrity shows to vertical and refined life areas.

At present, some of the online analyses of live streaming either discuss the overall industry situation in an overly macro way, or introduce the functions of the product in an overly one-sided way. These are really just self-praise. There are very few articles that discuss these issues in depth and horizontally from the perspective of experience:

• Why do the live broadcast rooms we see today look like they do now?
• What affects our live streaming experience?

The development of live broadcast design is a microcosm of experience design adapting to emerging technologies and emerging demand scenarios. In this issue, we will summarize the origin and development of live broadcast into four stages from the perspective of interaction. We will select several representative products from each stage and deeply analyze their layout characteristics. We will take everyone to appreciate the development history of the live broadcast room and briefly talk about the 17 years of development of live broadcast in China.

1. The Origin of Live Broadcasting

China's live streaming industry originated in 2005, when online games were popular. Large-scale comprehensive games such as CS, World of Warcraft, Red Alert, and Westward Journey Online dominated the entertainment life of netizens. Since games require teamwork, the timeliness of interaction is very important, and traditional text communication will affect the efficiency of finger operation and thus affect the gaming experience. Therefore, using voice software to "play black" has been sought after by the majority of game players.

At this time, a voice communication platform came into being: UT (UC talk). UT is an instant voice communication product launched by Sina.com mainly for game players. With its powerful voice communication function and the huge advantage of being the first to enter the market, it quickly rose in the game player market and became widely sought after. At that time, a saying was circulated in the WOW union: "Those who can't use UT should not join the union", which also indirectly reflected UT's "status in the world".

Players can create and join channels on UT to achieve instant voice communication within the game. At the same time, UT also supports adding friends and communicating using text and emoticons in the channel.

Observing the interface of UT in its early years, we can find that UT was deeply influenced by the popular text communication software QQ and MSN at that time. Although the product is labeled as "instant voice communication", a large area of ​​the interface is still used to support text communication functions.

By comparing the interaction frameworks of early QQ and UT with those of common instant voice communication tools in recent years, we can easily find the progress of instant voice communication tools over the past decade:

• Current instant voice communication tools use a large area of ​​the interface for voice communication, and display the speech status of the current speaker and online voice users in a timely manner;
• Text and emoji communications are presented in the corner as auxiliary work;
• No text speech will appear;
• Although adjusting the volume and microphone seems to be an important capability for voice communication, it is a one-time operation and therefore will not be directly displayed in a large area on today's voice communication pages.

In addition to UT, many other voice platforms were born from 2003 to 2008, such as LiaoLiao, JiuLiao, IS, AiLiao, and Shanda ET. YY, which is still one of the leaders in the live broadcast industry today, also appeared in this era. The emergence of voice platforms makes games more social.

Over time, players are no longer satisfied with simply playing games together, and many entertainment methods have begun to emerge on the platform. At the same time, with the advancement of network technology, real-time video technology has also been realized. People are no longer satisfied with voice social networking, and the Internet has begun to enter the video era.

2. The birth of live streaming

At the beginning, voice platforms that transformed into instant video communications simply added video areas to the channels, and users who liked to socialize and express themselves turned on the camera to host, chat, and sing, until the emergence of 9158.

In 2005, the founder of 9158 imitated the "ten-person room" model of online dating in South Korea and positioned the product as a "show venue" as soon as it went online. The name 9158 is also taken from the homonym of “just ask me out”.

The so-called "show" is to move personal shows to the Internet and cultivate a group of "anchors" who show their talents on the Internet through videos. The audience can interact with the anchors and spend money to buy gifts to "reward" the anchors' performances.

9158 was the first online chat room to introduce the words such as beautiful women and opposite-sex dating to Internet users. It was the earliest form of the live broadcast industry, mainly featuring chat rooms and karaoke. Because of its novel model and most of its content is "borderline", it attracted a large number of users to continue consuming and made a lot of money. In 2014, 9158 even took the lead and went public earlier than Alibaba, which was also located in Hangzhou at the time.

In 2008, when 9158 dominated the Internet, Liufang Room, a video portal with the vision of "becoming China's YouTube", was hit hard by the financial crisis and had no choice but to start its transformation. In 2009, it also launched the "Show" product. Similar to the 9158 model, a large number of young anchors with talents showed themselves in Liufang Room, interacted with fans, and made profits through fans giving them virtual items such as flowers, sports cars, and airplanes.

At almost the same time, 9158, which received financing from IDG, changed its positioning from a "show venue" to an "online KTV/chat room" and from a star performance mode to a mode where users in the room line up and take turns to perform and entertain, whether because of the intervention of capital or to solve the long-tail effect. After the transformation, 9158 no longer has to worry about its leading female anchors being poached by competitors and taking away a group of high ARPU users.

Although no screenshots of the interface of 9158's initial show were found, the shadow of the current live broadcast room can be seen from the functional screenshots of the subsequent transformation of the six-room show and 9158's online KTV. For example, the show framework at that time already included the room name/live broadcast nickname, video content area, chat/gift interaction area, and audience list.

These have basically constituted the elements of all live broadcast rooms today. The development of live broadcast in the next few years will be based on more detailed and vertical functional upgrades based on such a live broadcast room framework.

When Liujianfang was already working on the live broadcast concept, 9158 was still operating according to the room concept. The advantage of live streaming is that it can accommodate more people, with tens of thousands of people online. Compared with six rooms, 9158 is a bit closed. Because the number of people in each room will be controlled and there is an upper limit.

Although 9158 is still a multi-person video social room in concept before and after the transformation, it has all the product capabilities that a live broadcast room should have:

• There is both a gift area and a large prop runway, which can be regarded as the origin of today’s gift trays and gift special effects;
• The user list corresponds to the current online audience of the live broadcast room;
• Operations such as mic placement, song selection, tuning, and text input correspond to the interactive operation area of ​​the current live broadcast room;
• Public chat history corresponds to the comment interaction area of ​​today’s live broadcast room;
• Of course, there are also some personal chat records inherited from traditional text social chat rooms that are not suitable for live streaming and have disappeared in the historical iterations.

Whether it was the show venue in Liujianfang or the online KTV in 9158, although the main focus was on instant video capabilities at the time, a large area was still given to the public interaction area for the audience in the room. In addition to being influenced by the "multi-person social" positioning, it was also related to the popular product concept at the time.

At that time, there was a prevailing view in the industry that the number of non-paying users would affect the willingness of paying users to pay. Therefore, the product would hope to attract and activate more non-paying users by expanding the public chat area and providing a good interactive experience for ordinary users, so that paying users would feel more fulfilled in consumption, be more willing to consume, and convert more paying users.

In the year when 9158 and Liujianfang both achieved transformation, YY was just established in Guangzhou. It was not until 2011 that YY began to get involved in the live broadcast industry. However, due to its strong voice technology capabilities, it quickly developed in the live broadcast industry and was known as the three giants of the live broadcast industry at that time together with 9158 and Liufangjian.

During the YY live broadcast era, the PC live broadcast room began to rebuild the interactive framework with the host's screen as the most important content in the live broadcast room. The real-time video content produced by the host was displayed in a large area in the middle of the live broadcast room as the most important element. The audience list was on the left and the comment interaction area was on the right. Compared with the current PC or tablet version of the live broadcast room, there is basically no major change in the order of importance of information, except that the audience list and comment interaction have been extremely streamlined and put away.

The huge cake of "show venue" was soon favored by the capital market, and the cake of show venue was divided up wildly with the intervention of capital.

From 2012 to 2014, live broadcast products such as Kugou Fanxing, Kuwo Show, 56 Show, NetEase BOBO, Xuanwu, Youku Laifeng, and iQiyi Qixiu also quickly joined the live broadcast battle. At the same time, Longzhu Live and Panda TV also quickly entered the game live broadcast market with the intention of dividing up the game live broadcast territory.

Also, because the anchor is the core of the live broadcast content and has a strong head effect, the salary of this profession has risen sharply as various platforms compete for anchors. During this period, PC live streaming had to face two major challenges: the continuous entry of competitors and the huge amount of money spent to seize the top anchors, and the competition was fierce and intense.

Just when everyone thought that PC live streaming still had a long battle ahead of it, the popularity of smartphones and 4G networks pulled the live streaming battlefield from the PC to the mobile terminal.

3. Thousands of Broadcast Battles

In the era of mobile terminals, the threshold for live streaming has rapidly been lowered. Live streaming, which originally required at least a computer, a microphone, a camera and a suitable and stable environment, can now be easily achieved with just a mobile phone. The lowering of the threshold for live streaming and the intervention of capital have rapidly promoted the development of the live streaming industry. A large number of live streaming apps have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain, and have been hyped by the media as a "thousand-broadcast war."

At first, the mobile live broadcast room only had live broadcast screen, bullet screen/comment area and online audience. It is worth mentioning that after the move to the mobile battlefield, the live broadcast room has added "sharing". Even "sharing" is higher than the revenue-oriented "gifting" that appeared earlier in the mobile live broadcast room. In addition to the desire to quickly seize market share in the new battlefield, there may be the following reasons:

1. The PC side is used to sharing by copying (copying the URL, copying the channel number, even now the PC side is used to copying the QQ number instead of directly sharing the business card like WeChat), while the mobile side does not have the concept of copying the URL. Displaying the live broadcast room number + copying, and letting the person being shared paste and search, is far less efficient than simply "sharing";
2. After the battlefield shifted to the mobile side, because mobile phones are carried around, the online relationship between users is closer than it was on the PC side, so it is more convenient and faster to acquire users through relationship chains than on the PC side (this may also be the reason why the theory of sharing fission is so popular in the mobile era);
3. In the PC era, users relied more on active behavior to obtain content (using search engines to search for keywords). Active search was already able to obtain most information. After moving to mobile devices, due to technology or competitive relationships, there are information barriers between apps. Users cannot obtain information across apps through search, and need to rely on users' spontaneous manual transfer.

For a period of time thereafter, the mobile live broadcast rooms were "carrying" the product capabilities of the PC live broadcast rooms, such as gift sending, karaoke, beauty... At that time, mobile interaction was still in the exploratory stage, and mobile phone screens were not as large and long as they are now, so there was no consensus in the industry on the golden operation area in the lower right corner.

It can be seen that the interactive operations at the bottom at the beginning did not conform to the current layout habits of the live broadcast room. Some live broadcast rooms even put the close button in the lower right corner, while the lower right corner of the current live broadcast room is basically full of operations such as sending gifts and liking, which have strong user needs or strong product strategies.

While other apps have adapted to mobile phone broadcasting by filling the entire mobile phone screen with live broadcast images and placing operations at the bottom of the screen, YY and Huya Live, which specializes in game live broadcasting, have adopted a completely different live broadcast room layout. Huya Live specializes in game live streaming, and its unique live streaming features are mostly horizontal videos. When horizontal videos are adapted to the vertical screen, there will be a large amount of blank space, which can be used to fill in some functions that were originally exposed on the PC (comments, etc.).

The methods used by game live streaming apps such as Huya Live and Panda TV and "show" live streaming apps when porting live streaming from PC to mobile devices are exactly the two common processing ideas we encounter in daily needs when there is not enough space on the first screen: folding up the entrance and dividing the tabs.

In addition to carrying the capabilities of the PC, the mobile live broadcast room has also developed some functions that the PC does not have: functions derived from the characteristics of the mobile terminal: for example, because there are more and more functions in the live broadcast room, the UI and animation effects are becoming more and more numerous and complex. In order not to affect the consumption of live content, the mobile live broadcast room has an additional screen clearing function compared to the PC.

PC retro functions: such as voice live broadcast, voice chat room, and multi-person microphone connection. Multi-person microphone connection has developed into live broadcast PK, which helps to increase the revenue of live broadcast to a higher level.

In terms of gifts, we will continue to optimize the viewing experience of "The Big 1" in conjunction with online audiences based on the interests of sponsors, plan gift price tiers, and standardize gift trays and gift special effects. There are also some "Tears of the Times", such as the channel live broadcast room, but this ability is rarely seen now.

Due to the popularity of live streaming and the lack of national and platform supervision on the road to "money" development of the market, live streaming has become chaotic and has been labeled as "vulgar" for a long time. In November 2016, the Cyberspace Administration of China announced the "Internet Live Broadcast Service Management Regulations", which made detailed provisions on the qualifications of live broadcast platforms, real-name broadcasters, content review, etc., and removed 18 live broadcast applications in April 2017.

Coupled with Apple's forced collection of a 30% toll, BAT also began to enter the live broadcast field. Many small platforms were forced to leave the live broadcast market due to lack of traffic and insufficient capabilities. The battle among thousands of live broadcast companies ended with YY, Huya, and Inke, a few companies that obtained dual live broadcast licenses, winning in the end, and the live broadcast market fell into a bleak state.

However, in 2016, which is known as the first year of live streaming in China, several seeds were quietly planted, which not only brought a new wind to the live streaming industry a few years later, but also changed the future trend of the Internet: in September 2016, an app called A.me was born, and three months later it was renamed: Douyin Short Video; Taobao also launched live streaming in this year, and a well-known female anchor who sold goods became one of the first anchors on the platform.

4. Live streaming is integrated into daily life and develops in multiple fields

Although the live streaming industry has experienced the "Thousands of Live Streaming Wars" where the gods fought each other and has been on the crest of the Internet wave for several consecutive years, it has always been limited to talent shows and e-sports in the form of "shows" and has not penetrated into everyone's daily life. It has been unable to break the circle for a long time until the emergence of e-commerce live streaming.

The first to do e-commerce live streaming was not Taobao, but shopping guide platforms such as Mogujie. As one of the most popular e-commerce shopping guide platforms at the time, Mogujie received huge commissions from Taobao every year. After Taobao decided not to support shopping guide platforms anymore, Mogujie had to transform itself and embark on the path of building its own e-commerce platform. In order to survive in the cracks between giants like Taobao and JD.com, it took a fancy to live streaming and was the first to introduce live streaming into e-commerce.

It took only two months for Mogujie to enter the live streaming field and complete the construction of an e-commerce live streaming room (providing a complete consumption chain within the live streaming room). There have been no major changes to the e-commerce live streaming rooms since then. Most of them use red or orange shopping bags and shopping carts to represent the entrance to the product list. The shopping entrance will be enhanced with dynamic effects as the first priority operation in the live streaming room.

Because e-commerce live streaming does not need to rely on gift-giving for profit, and gift special effects will interfere with the display of goods, some platforms specializing in e-commerce live streaming have even stopped displaying gift-giving entrances in the live broadcast room, parting ways with the traditional show live broadcast format.

In 2019, Li Jiaqi's magical brainwashing catchphrase "OMG, buy it!" suddenly became popular. Because of this hottest buzzword in 2019, Li Jiaqi led the e-commerce live broadcast to break the circle. People who previously only knew about live broadcasting only as a "show" discovered the "new form" of live broadcasting. Immediately afterwards, Luo Yonghao, who was in debt of 600 million yuan, started his first live streaming show on Douyin, selling goods worth 110 million yuan in 3 hours, making everyone realize the profit points of live streaming beyond the gift-giving system.

In 2020, under the influence of the epidemic, live streaming sales, online education and online meetings became popular, and the live streaming industry ushered in a new wave of momentum.

In addition, from 2018 to 2019, the popularity of Tik Tok completely changed the usage habits of mobile users. From PC to mobile, the design ideas of Internet practitioners have always followed the principle of "recommendation first, then consumption", but Douyin radically adopted the idea of ​​"consumption first, then recommendation" and achieved outstanding results. Since then, Internet products have embarked on the design path of "consumption first, then recommendation".

Another design that changes user habits is the immersive infinite flow. The design idea of ​​​​TikTok's previous Internet products was to enter a space (which can be understood as a page, a live broadcast room, a specific functional process), return if it does not meet expectations, and then choose another space from the previous level to enter, then return, and then choose again...

By repeating this process, Tik Tok has taught users to quickly switch from one space to the next with a simple swiping gesture without going through any intermediate pages. Of course, such a design is very bold, and it is easy to lose users if the recommendations are unreliable.

Why can “consume first and then recommend” gain recognition from the market and users? It is not difficult to understand. When the early PC relied on search, we can understand it as requiring users to fill in the blanks. Users need to first think about the "keywords" they want, then fill in the search box, and finally get the content they need.

Later, when it came to mobile devices, each APP had a fixed recommended homepage, and users changed from filling in the blanks to multiple-choice questions, choosing their favorite consumption content from the ABCD options provided by the platform.

"Consume first, then recommend" has changed from a multiple-choice question to a true or false question. If I want it, I will keep it. If I don’t want it, I will just swipe it away. From fill-in-the-blank questions to multiple-choice questions to true or false questions, it helps users reduce their thinking costs step by step. Gesture interaction did not appear in 2018 and 2019. It has been repeatedly studied as early as when smartphones became popular. However, most products are eager to obtain "data benefits" from new functions, and dare not and are unwilling to educate users to use more advanced but more obscure interaction methods. I have to admire Tik Tok’s ideas and courage for “innovation”.

The impact of these two changes in usage habits on the interaction between live broadcast rooms is almost uniform across the entire industry. Now almost all live broadcast rooms can be switched directly by swiping down (except Huya Live, which uses tabs instead of entrances when transferring functions, resulting in the sliding operation within the tab and swiping down the live broadcast room being mutually exclusive and unable to be realized). A large number of platforms have also chosen the interactive form of entry and consumption and provide more live broadcast options in the upper right corner.

In addition to the super trend of e-commerce live streaming, due to the rise of online education in the past few years, many people have also invested in the knowledge education live streaming sector, and paid live teaching has also become one of the key vertical fields of live streaming.

Nowadays, people have long since removed the "vulgar" label from live streaming and have accepted its integration into our daily shopping, education, music, making friends, chasing stars, and other life demands. Even official media will report news on live streaming platforms. Live streaming has been integrated into people’s daily lives. Everyone watches live streaming and everyone can do live streaming. In the future, live streaming will cover more industries and become more refined and standardized.