GGLeagues is a recreational eSports league for college and high school players of League of Legends or Dota 2 since summer 2018. Each season, they provide weekly online matches with an in-person championship finals.

Deliverables

Research
User Testing
Wireframes
Prototype

Tools

Sketch
Invision
Axure

Project Length - Summer 2019, 4 weeks

Team - Jason Tian, Ingrid Lederman, AJ Seiden, Esi Ozemebhoya

The Goal/Challenge

To gain new users and increase user retention and improve the overall user experience of the website- an easy navigational platform that foster community, provide essential information, and encourage friendly competition.

The Approach

Research

Through our domain research and competitive analysis of direct and indirect competitors, we were able to identify three key insights;

Players and teams need to access essential information such as statistics in order to track their growth/progress. They also need this content to be able to scout other players and teams or to strategize gameplay.
The industry is pushing to provide friendly competition because there aren’t many platforms that reach out to local players who game recreationally.
Everyone needs a sense of an inclusive community to bring players together and to increase the sense of being a special part of this league. This fosters a more comfortable and more fruitful, central hub for players who are trying to achieve similar objectives.
2. USER Research

After many rounds of interviewing/testing , my team found out that users wanted to see their progress as an individual and team player, but also for GGLeagues to be a comfortable space that promotes friendly competition and connectivity.

The following are key takeaways from our users:

Users expressed that statistics are a priority to use it as a tool to keep up with their progress and to scout other players and teams.
Users feel most connected as a community when they are able to personally relate
Users enjoy tracking achievement and progress as individuals and as a team

We further interviewed industry experts to gain more insights in the eSports world which further confirmed both the user goals and GGLeagues goals.

It is important for both players and coaches to track growth and progress within teams to scout opponents and recruit players
In-person events and friendly competition are favored because they help create a sense of community and increase engagement

Problem Statement

With our research, we were able to synthesize and identify the problem:

Enthusiastic eSports players need a digital way to stay connected with gaming and league information and content in order to enjoy being a part of an active and cohesive community of gamers, beyond just being competitors.

Then we identified key design principles:

Inclusive - To help passionate gamers form lasting relationships.
Reliable - To provide up-to-date, accurate important content
Informative - To display readily accessible information at all times
Engaging - To encourage interactions, game-play, and community-building

Ideation

We finally formed two concepts address user needs in different ways:

Performance-focused - The first concept focuses on the user’s performance as a player. We added and modified all of the content and formatting of the main pages that many users expressed change for. The following are specific details that were significant:

DASHBOARD

We inserted an overview of the most important statistics and league information for users to get a quick rundown of everything that is relevant to them at that very moment. This would increase user retention by providing easy access to all of the information that users look for.
We created a community section with streaming highlights and team of the month recognition to foster GGLeagues’ community.
Most of the layout and added features are in the same manner for the Player/Team profile.

Profile page

We made a badge system to recognize players and teams for their achievements from season to season. This would be available to the community as a whole including players based on their statistics and players who are great teammates. Badges are for players and banners are for teams.

2. Connection-focused - The second concept is focused on helping users form personal connections and is a way for users to come together as friends through the GGLeagues website. This concept includes a more simple and visual approach with a welcoming feel.

Player card

We created players cards for users to have a more fun, personalized profile and to have a unique way of adding new friends by trading cards. The idea is to create a more humanizing outlook for users to feel more connected to the community that is more than just gaming.

After testing, we found that the community/connection concept and performance-based content were both components that GGLeagues users valued. However, players mentioned that even though they wish more of community presence, it cannot be at the expense of important information including statistics, schedules, news and more. League content is first, community is second.

And so we realized that the best solution would be to combine the two concepts. We wanted to prioritize the Performance Concept to focus on team and player performance while also borrowing themes from the second concept such as highlighting streams and player rewards or recognition. We believed that this combination would most effectively increase the usability of the site, retain existing users, and enhance the community aspect.

Final Design (Solution/Results)

With our research findings we created a prototype that has a combination of the two concepts:

Here are some specific features that address user problems:

Dashboard

The banner at the top showing major announcements and important information presented throughout are strategically put to keep players up to date. This increases user retention so that they want to revisit GGLeagues for its useful content and easy access to information.
A community section is added to clearly show the community aspect of GGLeagues

Player profile

*A space for an avatar and quote to add some personalization and a sense of community*
*Discord, Twitch, and op.gg linked for players to have direct ways to connect, socialize, and engage with each other*
*Team Profile, Leagues, Statistics have been modified with essential information that users expressed were important to look at*
Achievements section for the leagues they’ve won and a new addition of badges which team captains can give out not only to players who have awesome stats but also players who fulfill the community aspect

Team profile

The same changes were made to the team profile with the addition of the roster.
For teams, we added banners which are used in the same manner as badges.

next match

We decided that a hybrid of a direct messaging feature and a version of what Discord offers to players is needed. This discussion board is exclusively accessible to players participating in that match rather than a discord channel that is for the division they were playing in. This prevents the hassle of locating opponents on Discord, waiting for responses. We looked at Facebook group’s successful Discussion Board as a reference.

Overall, we found that users rated the prototype with an average ease of use rating of 4.1 out of 5 and an average satisfaction rating of 4.4 out of 5.

Reflecting back, we narrowed down and identified the main goals to increase GGLeagues’ user base, retain current users and improve the overall user experience. We conducted some research and interviewed current users, learning that their goals are not far off from GGLeagues’. They wanted to make progress as a team and stay connected to this community that allows for friendly competition.

We had to find a way to represent the information users were interested in, while not straying from the core values of GGLeagues. Following testing, we found that the best way to meet this goal would be a performance-focused interface that incorporated connection-based features. We went on to build a prototype that represents all of the data we synthesized.

By integrating more information users are interested in, they now have a reason to not only visit, but keep coming back to the GGLeagues website and turn that into an integral part of their eSports routine. It was a challenge to find the right balance in addressing both the client goals and the user needs. We tried to create a prototype that solves both worlds which improves user retention while maintaining the same fun and friendly gaming environment that users were drawn to in the first place. Design can always be iterated and improved upon, and so we decided to keep moving forward with GGLeagues to create an even better product.

GGLeagues