From editorial content to creative community
TL;DR
Voicemod Tuna was designed to address the shortage of fresh content for our users to enjoy during gaming sessions. We built a platform where they could discover, create, and share new content made for and by the community. It started as a standalone website but is now fully integrated into Voicemod with thousands of new sounds added monthly.
Before developing it, we conducted extensive user research to identify the most pressing pain points, which led us to experiment with multiple solutions.
Following the release, we continued with the product development with improvements like an AI-powered auto-moderation tool to help curate content or the possibility to upload voices too.
My Role
I led the discovery, design, and analysis phases of the project, making sure we delivered a seamless and engaging experience.
After the launch (and while I continued overseeing the product) I helped the team identify, ideate, and ship new features using the data we were collecting.
Timeline
2020 - 2022
What is Voicemod?
Voicemod is a freemium app that lets gamers and streamers modify their voice in real time and trigger sound effects during gaming sessions. It offers both FREE and PRO plans, with exclusive access to premium voices, curated soundboards, and the Voicelab (a state-of-the-art voice creator).
Production speed, our biggest pain
We had a dedicated content team producing premium sounds and voices. But the pace of internet trends made it nearly impossible to keep up while maintaining high quality.
As a result, many users turned to other platforms to find the content they needed and often leaving Voicemod (18% of uninstalls were due to this).
Business Goal
Transition to a hybrid model that combines curated premium content with user-generated content (UGC), to keep up with trends and empower the community
Learning about our users' behavior through data
We first looked at the data we already had
We analyzed user behavior using Amplitude and internal database queries, and combined that with feedback from satisfaction surveys and uninstall reasons.
70% of PRO users used their own custom sounds more than Voicemod’s
FREE users frequently changed the sounds in their soundboards
45% of users who uninstalled cited “lack of relevant or trendy content”
But we needed to know more
To dig deeper, we conducted qualitative interviews with FREE and PRO users.
We had the opportunity to interview a wide range of users, from teenagers to people in their twenties with different concerns, needs and problems.
These are some of the insights we got that helped us define the final solution:
Users wanted to express themselves creatively through sound
They were excited to share their creations and gain recognition within the community.
It was difficult for them to discover new, relevant or trending sounds inside the app.
Users were frustrated by the manual process of importing content from other platforms.
Framing the Challenges
After collecting all the research data, it was time to sit down, define and decide the objectives we were going to address to achieve our main goal.
[Goal 1]
How might we help users discover relevant and trendy content without leaving Voicemod?
[Goal 2]
How might we encourage users to create and share their own sounds?
[Goal 3]
How might we ensure quality while scaling up community-generated content?
[Goal 4]
How might we increase retention and conversion for FREE users through community engagement?
Co-Creating and Validating Solutions
We ran ideation workshops with different stakeholders from the team (product, content, marketing, and engineering) to explore possible directions, selected the most promising ideas and prototyped them for testing.
- Maze tests (with over 200 responses)
- 1-on-1 interviews with FREE and PRO users
- Fast feedback loops with our Discord community
This iterative process helped us understand what excited users, and what didn’t.
A platform to share custom voice presets
What our testers said about this idea
“I used to screenshot my settings and send them in Discord. This is way easier—and now my friends can just try my voice instead of copying everything.” — Liam, 16
“I made this creepy echo voice for horror games and people actually liked it! Feels cool to have something that’s mine that others use.” — Nina, 14
Why did we discard this option?
At that time, our users were more interested in sounds than voices.
The voice creator tool wasn't as powerful as we needed for them to create top-noch voices.
A sound-based social network inside Voicemod
What our testers said about this idea
“It feels like Youtube but just for funny sounds. I could spend hours just scrolling and testing stuff in my soundboard.” — Jordan, 18
"I liked that I could follow other users who make cool meme sounds. It’s more fun than just downloading random stuff.” — Eli, 15
Why did we discard this option?
Integrating a complete platform into our product was not feasible at the time.
A marketplace for community-created sounds
What our testers said about this idea
“Being able to find packs or themes made by famous is super cool” — Sofía, 17
“I made this creepy echo voice for horror games and people actually liked it! Feels cool to have something that’s mine that others use.” — Nina, 14
Why did we discard this option?
Depended on having a team to capture and create content from recognized creators
Was not delivering what we wanted on user-created content
Voicemod Tuna
A User-Powered Sound Discovery Platform
Our chosen solution was a lightweight external platform where users could upload, discover, and share short audio clips, with a direct integration to Voicemod for one-click import.
This MVP allowed us to validate the core experience quickly at the same time allowing us to iterate and modify the platform to try to achieve new objectives.
Why external at first?
- Legal risks around copyrighted content
- Technical constraints of full integration
- Need to validate user interest before scaling
The landing page
- Our main objective was to make easy for any user to start finding cool sounds.
- It is also one of the steps of our conversion funnel for Voicemod since we use part of our landing space to promote our app.
- At first we changed the trending sounds by hand but after a while we developed an automation to update them every week based on times downloaded and likes given.
User Profile
- We wanted to build a place for users to store and manage their favourite sounds
- It was also in our sights to direct this section towards something similar to a social network. This was our first approach.
- Needless to say, it was a low-level need to achieve our objectives and we put little effort into the social side of the product.
Adding content
- Spoiler: we failed with this feature. It was hard to use, unintuitive, slow... I mean, everything you can do wrong in Product Design was done here.
- We tried many different approaches and none of them worked perfectly, but we needed something to launch the site.
- We had to discard the option of importing videos directly from Youtube because, although it was technologically possible, we didn't want to upset more people.
Our main item, the sound cards
- We wanted to offer Voicemod users an easy way to import sounds into their account while becoming another way for other users to discover Voicemod.
- The information displayed allowed our users tu know more about the sound even before playing it.
A High-Impact MVP
The platform launched to strong adoption and immediate signs of user engagement. The MVP proved there was clear demand for UGC, and that it could drive meaningful business results.
+38%
Increase in custom sound usage among FREE users
+11%
Conversion uplift from FREE to PRO
+17%
Weekly retention boost in Voicemod for Tuna users
-8%
Decrease in Voicemod uninstalls
+20k
Sounds uploaded in the first month alone
Insights that helped us shape Voicemod’s future
The platform launched to strong adoption and immediate signs of user engagement. The MVP proved there was clear demand for UGC, and that it could drive meaningful business results.
Users are eager to create and share when given the right tools
Community content can rival editorial quality, especially for trend relevance
Removing friction from the content flow significantly improves engagement
Sometimes, building your product outside is the fastest way to test big ideas
Encouraging community creativity is a strategic asset, not a side effect
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros elementum tristique. Duis cursus, mi quis viverra ornare, eros dolor interdum nulla, ut commodo diam libero vitae erat. Aenean faucibus nibh et justo cursus id rutrum lorem imperdiet. Nunc ut sem vitae risus tristique posuere .
