Google Esports
A unique voting and participation platform to host Google Play’s Esports gaming tournament in Japan, called “Mana.”
The platform needed to speak to 2 identified user groups, ‘Respect Seekers’ and ‘Casual Gamers,’ incorporating features that enabled users to view game play, vote for their favorite e-sports teams and be rewarded for their efforts through prizes, leaderboards and certificates.
Our Research and Design identified the important user groups and created a platform that brings together the joy and community of gaming.
Onboarding users in a way that showed them how to interact and vote allowed them to prepare for the live matches given the tournament complexity.
Personalized dashboard and community leaderboards were key in encouraging community and a sense of achievement.
Inviting gameplay voting meant that users could vote for the individual player they thought was going to win while looking at previous wins, performance and analytics.
As the tournament had multiple matches and game types, we had to ensure that the designs could flex across all. In this view, users were also able to utilize ‘expert’ voting, where they were able to use up to 3 ‘tips’ from expert analysts.
User research helped us uncover attitudes towards gameplay, competitive gaming, voting and building community.
Users are more likely to watch gameplay on their mobiles than desktop
Users are interested and excited by the ability to vote but expect to be rewarded but want to know more about the players so they can support teams and predict the winner better
Users prefer to play casually because they think eSports is too competitive
Conducting an Experience Audit
A best in and best out of class Experience Audit helped us identify how other tournaments and championships ran and performed both locally to Japan, as well as Globally as well as adjacent experiences that included competitions and voting. Our audit revealed:
Hierarchy is King
There needs to be a clear hierarchy of information shown through dynamic components that allow users to feel connected to the tournament and subsequent games
Personaliation matters
Personalisation and a tailored experience will leverage the website beyond a single tournament destination, creating reasons for users to drive community and return to the site
Community is key
The website should promote community and engagement in a playful and simple way. This could be done through finding influencers, viewing previous tournaments, viewing highlights and creating community
Understanding the users, problem and solution allowed us to craft the value proposition
Task based user journeys allowed us to identify the needs of Viewers, participants and what that meant for the overall brand.
Experience pillars helped to define the parameters of our design and build, and aimed to guide play throughout years that followed.
Spark joy
Create joy through community, voting and at every interaction
Make it useful
Create legendary players with helpful content
Build community
Bring platers closer together, before, during and after tournaments
Providing structure through mapping
The sitemap and user flow needed to consider the way a Google member or non Google member would navigate to signing up/signing in as well as gameplay and casting votes from their account.
Through our research and definition phases, we were able to define “Mana”
Mana isn’t just about winning, it’s about the joy of gaming
Existing Esports platforms campaigned about the intensity of competition and their voting platforms are all winner oriented. We had a chance to create an experience that sets Mana apart from the competition.
Gameplay voting creates a sense of community
Knowing we had existing functionality of winner voting and armed with the knowledge that participants were looking for community and a less serious tone, we decided to implement and test Gameplay voting.
Voting data should always be easy to understand
Collaborating with Google on the complex data sets we were going to capture during voting was only the beginning. Translating this into our designs was our next challenge.
The result of our teams work, was an engaging, fun and robust platform that not only met KPI’s but exceeded them
👀 10,000,000+ views exceeded our KPI by a 1000%
🗳️ 25,000+ votes happened at the same time, exceeding our KPI by 200%
*Website is only live during tournaments
➺ Next up MetLife, Google Education