PROBLEM

Our sponsor Unikrn provides a platform for eSports enthusiasts to gather insights, play and bet on popular games like League of Legends, Counter-Strike and more. Their mission is to increase engagement around eSports and become an industry leader.

We found out that most users have difficulty comprehending how eSports betting works and tend to bounce off Unikrn's website. To address this problem, we made it our mission to redesign Unikrn’s web experience to

1. Increase ease of use

2. Reduce learning curve

3. Establish trust among enthusiasts

We used a user-centered design process: conducting primary and secondary research, ideating based on our findings, creating several hypotheses and testing new user flows and prototypes with the end users before finally creating high-fidelity visuals for our proposed solution.

DELIVERABLES

We created new interactive UI designs and gave a short presentation to our sponsor. We designed a poster to explain our problem and proposed solution and demonstrated the project at iSchool capstone event in UW.

We also created a 43 page report that outlines our process and highlights overall team contributions.

PROCESS OVERVIEW

Research

Before conducting user research, our objective was to understand the eSports market and identify the competitors. We used Unikrn website ourselves and read about reports published about eSports industry. We identified competitors and performed a competitive analysis.

We presented a Business Strategy Teardown of different types of eSports markets to our sponsor. We revealed a mantra for our user's needs:

An eSports user is mostly Millennial who wants  = Mobile + Social + ‘Instant Gratification’ Theme

Our primary and secondary research consisted of observing and interviewing eSports experts, enthusiasts and existing betters. We looked into websites they follow, games they play, their betting experiences and motivations.

Based on our initial interviews, observations and research, we developed our target personas and identified their behaviors. We mapped user flow of the existing website to identify current Information Architecture.

ideation

We brainstormed and came up with several ideas for both new user experience of Unikrn.com as a whole as well as for individual features. We performed an Expert Review of the existing UI to add focus to our thinking. We created affinity diagram to help maintain content hierarchy while designing new user flows.

 In order to simplify user workflow, we hypothesized our goals into user stories capturing user needs, use case and acceptance criteria (expected result baseline). We worked with our sponsor to define an equation identifying key performance indicators that will drive the business for them.

prototyping

We created several prototypes of varying degrees of fidelity to test our assumptions and design ideas from the research phase.

Our final prototype was a revamped user interface with a focus on:

1. Simplified onboarding experience with new tutorial

2. Trust focused UI with white backdrop

3. Added statistics to help user make educated betting decisions

We tested our prototypes through usability study wherein we gave every user a specific task and upon its completion, we asked satisfaction related questions. We later surveyed each user for measuring Net Promoter Score.

We performed limited A/B testing by giving some of our users redesigned UI and testing controlled groups on old UI. We created prototypes using inVision.

Our tests have shown higher engagement rates with the new UX. Once implemented, the new UI will be more user-friendly and trustworthy; targeting an audience of 600,000 users who will together wager around $85M in 2016.

design

We used Unikrn's new design components library for our updated user interface. We worked with engineers to plan how our new revamped design will be implemented with less engineering effort. 

Project Management

We used a trello board to manage the project. This trello board was also shared with the engineering and product teams at Unikrn for review and planning. We had a weekly status report and Gantt chart prepared early on to help all stakeholders stay updated with the progress of the project.

DELIVERABLES

We created new interactive UI designs and gave a short presentation to our sponsor. We designed a poster to explain our problem and proposed solution and demonstrated the project at iSchool capstone event in UW.

We also created a 43 page report that outlines our process and highlights overall team contributions.

• Project Report

• Project Poster

• Project Promo Video (available below)

FINAL THOUGHTS

We used User Centered Design and LEAN Startup book's techniques to design the optimal solution for this problem. Our UX design process guideline is available here.

I had no idea that the eSports industry is going to be this huge market opportunity. I have understood the nuances of starting a company and developing products for markets that do not exist today. I am confident that I can now work my way through minimal data to make informed and calculated decisions.