A web platform making it easier to consume and follow eSports

I joined Enthusiast Gaming (TSE: EGLX) team as a contract design director for Upcomer, an eSports platform. The site and its accompanying mobile app involved a variety of content types and formats: news, videos, eSports matches, tournaments, and player profiles.

I was put in charge of leading design efforts and managed a team of designers and mobile developers to complete a design and mobile refresh. This project included a number of skillsets - UX, visual design, and project management.

At this time, the new Upcomer website is in beta and will be launching soon!

At the time I joined, Upcomer was already receiving thousands of visitors on a daily basis as per Google Analytics and Amplitude. The site started out as a news blog, and the team wanted to expand it into an all-encompassing eSports platform and to start launching product enhancements based on the feedback received by their users.

I was responsible for delegating tasks and driving forward design decisions all while taking in constant input from management, product teams, and Upcomer's users.

Additionally, the platform needed an overhaul due to major inconsistencies across its web and mobile versions.

As a business, one of Upcomer’s goals was to improve user engagement and retention rates. We identified areas in the app that presented opportunities for improvement. From navigation to match prediction, there were several micro areas we focused on with objectives to increase user experience and reduce bounce rates.

As an example - by showing reactions on a match (as opposed to a stack of listings), users can easily determine which matches are “hot” and getting a lot of attention and therefore more likely to check them out. Users became "curators" of the matches themselves automatically through reactions and comments. The result? A sense of community, increased engagement, and automatic curation within the app.

Additionally, through user feedback and comments, we determined other common patterns and issues users faced the most, and prioritized the design and development of these features accordingly.

Personalization and curation is something we wanted to make effortless for the users. Through a customized onboarding experience and a custom “game context selector” component, users were to curate their entire feeds to only show the games, players, and teams they were interested in.

All the while making it easy to “switch back” between views and filters so they could narrow down exactly what the kind of content they wanted to receive.