Creating the official European portal for eSports tournaments
Design Lead // Web
The project
Riot Games, creators of League of Legends, are one of the foremost competitive MOBAs in the industry, with one of the largest eSports following and prize money in excess of a million. Professional sports teams, top-tier sponsorship, and a cult-like following of the competitive gaming scene make the eSports landscape a vital part of Riot’s strategy to keep League of Legends a relevant and engaging title for its millions of active players.
A huge aspect of this eSports scene is fan-made analytics platforms, particularly in relation to the current meta. However, whilst the fan-made content utilised a vast amount of data points, what they lacked was the engagement and reach within the eSports community that Riot had, but wasn’t using.
Riot Games then approached us with the challenge of making their own eSports more competitive than that of crowd-based alternatives, utilising and making better use of in-game and player statistics to drive engagement to their own platform, ultimately retaining the player base of the game. Adding to the design challenge was the need to showcase complex data in a digestible way across devices.
Finally, it was also to make the eSports platform feel more mature and reflect the professional nature in which the competitive gaming scene is actually treated behind-the-scenes.
Prior to our work commencing, preliminary user research and wireframing had been carried out by another digital partner. The research, namely in the form of qualitative user interviews, provided insight into the top aspects the users wanted from the platform. This was broken down into 3 core pillars.
- Finding out more about my favourite players
- Finding fixtures and results
- Finding the latest news and game information
Working closely with the in-house creative and technical teams at Riot’s Brighton office, the areas we wanted to focus on were the perception of the site as well as the aspects that Riot could offer and 3rd parties couldn’t – which was an abundance of content and unparalleled access to the professional players. We repositioned the site away from the “gamey” look and feel typically associated with eSports sites and instead created a look more reflective of a professional sports website. We leveraged editorial content as a key engagement piece whilst also creating a user interface which allowed for a huge amount of content in the way of fixtures, results and other related content, all readily displayed within the user’s viewable screen space.
The site was successfully relaunched with the strategy proving to be one of the major factors in its success. The fans are engaged with the site’s content with a strong increase in engagement and dwell time, with lower bounce rates, and to top it off, it also won a Silver award at W3 for the gaming and game-related category.