LinkSquad, find your dreamteam
Social Network Gaming
The world of work is constantly changing, it does not stop evolving or reinventing itself, and more and more new figures are appearing in the labor sector. This has affected many economic sectors and has given rise to new ones, such as the gaming sector.
Today, there are people who make a living playing video games professionally, among them many minors. They form professional teams, train many hours a day like soccer players and broadcast their matches with other teams on specific channels. They move masses, create expectation, have followers, have marked a generation, they are E-SPORTS.
E-sports are here to stay and to create a totally new work environment that arises from their own needs. And this is where the idea of LinkSquad came from.
LinkSquad, will allow the gamer user to search and create positions in teams, keep up to date with the latest tournaments to sign up, contact or connect with other players and display a profile according to the needs of a resume for gamers, both for dedicated professionals and future professionals.
And with this in mind, let’s gut this social network and my personal project.
To begin with I will tell you about how it was developed and how this product idea was arrived at.
Research and development
Time to develop the project 11 days.
Initially the idea was to solve the search for partners or friends to play multiplayer games, something that really holds true. But when I started with the interviews I had to turn the project around, since many of the players told me that they didn’t really care who they played with and that it wasn’t complicated to find people.
Most multiplayer games have their own way of finding members for your team, and if you’re not playing competitively it doesn’t really matter who you’re playing with, as you’re just looking to hang out and get away from it all. There was a player who explained it to me with the example of a specific game, Monster Hunter World for PC, where there is a common goal for the players and it is cooperative, therefore, players do not care who is the partner, whether stranger or friend. This led me to study a little more the games and the types of existing players, which made me focus on a specific type of game, the e-sports world games, which are the really competitive games and the player profile is usually different.
After researching the user using tools such as empathy map and using some other tools at my reach, I came to define our user persona and user journey.
I continued researching and analyzing the competition as well as finding out what I could offer that the rest of the competition did not have.
Design
After having a clear idea of the product and the objective, doing a LOW-FI prototyping, I used some of the tools at my reach like the moodboard to orientate the type of design we were looking for. The results were undoubtedly interesting, since the world of e-sports is still taking off.
Two fonts were chosen to contrast and better hierarchize the information. In addition, both fonts are sans-serif since it is a web application and legibility is higher. On the other hand, they fit better with the overall design sought for the product.
image fontface
The colors were sought taking as a requirement and starting point the moodboard and the branding attributes: active, energetic and futuristic.
With this in mind, the colors for the form fields were evaluated and studied, since they are an important part of this application.
HI-FI Prototype
For this prototype I have based on the experience of a user who is already registered and is actively looking for a new member for his team.
Context: You are a LinkSquad user and you are looking for a new member for your team of the video game Overwatch for the PC platform.
You must use the dynamic search engine in the menu, filter the search by Overwatch pc players and select the first player that appears. And finally you will take a look at the player’s profile.
Functionalities and monetization
For this large project I thought about adding extra functionalities since only the minimum viable product (MVP) is shown here. Among these functionalities I would highlight the messaging through a real time chat, invitation management for events or tournaments, connection management with other users, personal calendar to check the events in which you have registered and the differentiation of the different user profiles available or possible for LinkSquad, such as recruiter and sponsor.
Monetization is directly related to the different user profiles and the needs of each profile.
