Guild Matters

Design Research, UX/UI, Branding
Project Overview
Before Covid-19, me and a small group of friends hosted video game tournaments throughout Texas and Louisiana in game shops, E-sports lounges, and small businesses. We called ourselves Guild Matters. As we continued hosting more tournaments, and connecting with more businesses, I saw an opportunity for an application to make hosting and attending E-sports events more streamlined and accessible, and to build local communities around video games.
Challenges
The esports industry is very decentralized, with innumerable games to choose from, and many separate businesses trying to carve out their own communities inside an already fractured one. This causes the information about local video game events to be very non-accessible, usually only members of closed communities will hear about the latest events in their area, and anyone else who may be interested in participating will never hear anything about them. This app must support the inherent variety of services and events that this industry provides, and allow businesses the freedom to operate in their own unique ways while making the information about these events easy to access by anyone.

Execution
The solution I have created consists of a mobile app system that will allow businesses to host events and connect to their communities. It will also allow users the ability to easily browse the gaming events in their area, and give them incentive to participate in these activities.
Approach
This project has undergone several different phases from its inception, and is still an ongoing project. The first phase was during the period we hosted events, and I used that time to talk to attendees and business operators, which led me to the idea of creating this application, however, I needed to do more research before I could truly begin creating it. During the second phase, I needed more objective information about the state of the esports industry, and I collected it through sending out a survey to gamers all around the United States, and interviews I conducted with business owners. These led me to creating my user personas, and highlighted the main problems that this service could solve, and new opportunities that I could create. For the final phase, I created a user flow and screens for the first working version of Guild Matters.
Research
I conducted a survey of 141 possible users around the United States to see the state of the Esports industry in different areas, and to see where problems arise that could be fixed with an application. I also Interviewed 2 business owners to identify the best solutions to implement in order to help their business grow, and to gain insight into how a possible business owner may use my application. I created two user personas based on the information I recieved from my research, and Utilized IBM Design Thinking practices to understand their unique pain points and needs.

User Persona 1 — Blane Repinske
User Persona 2 — Joe Lambdin
Research Takeaways
From my survey I saw that there is no centralized way to learn about local Esports events happening in any given location. The most popular sources for information about these events come from hard to access communities such as private facebook groups, discord servers, and word of mouth. From my first interview with a small business owner, I learned that they needed a way to organize and host the event itself, as it was a break from their normal operations. From my second interview with an Esports-centered business owner, I learned that even though there is a large market for Esports events, the amount of work to make sure the event was noticed by the community was far from Convenient. Esports businesses have very few ways to connect with their audience outside of the events they host, and the owner wanted ways to turn their inconsistent attendees into a full community.

Flowchart
Wireframes
Logo Sketches
Morphological Logo Creation
Logo Exploration
Primary Logo
Secondary
Badge
Typography
UI Iterations
Login
Onboarding
Register
Home Page
Home Page Cont.
Venue Profile
Event Information
Live Event Check-In
Completed Event