Vanta organizes tournaments for middle and high school esport teams. In this project, I collaborated with a Product Manager and Software Engineer to increase match participation; teams can now manage their matches, view opponent details, and join optional scrimmages. These updates increase team participation and save Customer Support over 20 hours per week in manual work coordinating matches.
About Vanta
Vanta is an early-stage startup dedicated to creating a safe environment for young gamers. Each season, they host over 60 local and national tournaments across 30 different games for middle and high school teams.
How it Started
Over several tournaments, we noticed a rise in match no-shows. Upon further investigation, we discovered that coaches often have to cancel at the last minute and fail to notify their opponents. This leaves the opposing team frustrated, unsure of what to do. Therefore, we decided to create a system that matches teams in real-time for a scrimmage so that every team has a chance to play.
I first wanted to understand how matches are currently being coordinated. I read through the official match rules and interviewed Customer Support to understand their involvement. I discovered that Customer Support spends over 20 hours per week generating unique lobby IDs for each match! She is also responsible for rescheduling matches and tracking forced forfeits. This raises the question: how might we automate match-related tasks in order to reduce Customer Support intervention AND improve the match experience for teams?
Next, I interviewed three middle-school coaches to gain insights into their experiences with matches. I learned that coaches want access to information about their opposing team, specifically gamer stats to better prepare for a match and the coach's contact information to quickly communicate in the event of a no-show. This highlighted the need for product solutions that encourage team participation, as well as safeguards to prevent negative match experiences.
Stakeholders: Additional Requirements
Finally, in discussions with key stakeholders, the following needed to be incorporated in the design:
A check-in process to improve match coordination
The logic for when and how teams are matched for a scrimmage. Teams are matched using a queue system which opens at the start of the official match. Matching begins 10 minutes after the match starts, and the queue will remain open for approximately three hours. Teams will only be matched with others from their league.
User flow shows the logic for the queue system
Next Steps
Automate the match rescheduling process to decrease customer support intervention.
Allow matches to be live-streamed by peers, parents and school administrators to increase esport buy-in.
Challenges
In this project, I had to think through various time- and action-dependent states. This was further complicated by the various user scenarios.
User Research
User Interviews
User Interface Design
Prototyping