Before/After: LevelUp Labs' social feed redesign for competitive gamers

Gaming · 4 min read

The 'before' experience prioritized algorithmic engagement—longer sessions and clickbait-like items—but moderators and players reported rising toxicity and irrelevant content. LevelUp's product designers started with a qualitative phase: 40 interviews, sentiment analysis on chat logs, and heatmaps showing players ignored certain feed actions.

Design choices for the 'after' focused on predictable affordances: separating match highlights from social chatter, introducing explicit intent filters (watch, discuss, challenge), and surfacing player-sourced tags to improve relevance. The company removed opaque score-based ranking in favor of a freshness-and-behavior hybrid, and redesigned the reaction system to discourage pile-on negativity by capping visible downvotes.

Post-launch metrics showed session depth increased by 18%, time-to-first-interaction dropped by 22%, and moderator workload decreased due to clearer content context and reduced toxic amplification. This case highlights how gaming UX must balance algorithmic objectives with community health and affordance clarity.