For 8 years LUTI had made use of a combination of Google services, tournament bracketing websites and online messaging apps to run its events. This separation was a barrier to both players and staff, handicapping the dissemination and archival of data— especially when team counts hit the hundreds, and players in the thousands.

It was important to model a future-proof application that would evaluate where each team should be placed based on historical trends. Regardless, some placement and seeding* would inevitably continue to be done manually due to the fleeting nature of teams in the scene.

As one of the founders of LUTI I had a very deep understanding of the shortcomings of the administrative process. A custom solution was pitched not only to eliminate the labor and redundancies associated with translating information between platforms, but also to create a service for collecting and charting that invaluable data.

With help from staff, I drafted a list of required features:

I conducted mock league setups on different bracketing platforms to crack down on necessary features. Sendou.ink, specifically, is a platform dedicated towards the same esport ran by LUTI and was conducive to discovering edge-case scenarios.

The dashboard was designed to consolidate all software and services, allow for indirect communication, and automatically determine future rankings of teams based on collected data. I designed the interface to make it convenient for staff to transfer the skills of their existing workflow.

Here is the structure of the overarching interface:

The teams screen displays every registered team and its associated data— with an entry to manually assign them to a division. By default, teams are marked with tags based on their performance in the previous season and/or any alarming behavior that could affect their placement (e.g no-show).

Users have the ability to remove, assign or create brand new tags to convey information to others. Extensive filtering options makes managing teams more convenient.

Groups are automatically generated for each division, where each team is labeled and ready for more precise seeding. Handles on every team allow users to intuitively adjust their placement appropriately. An ellipses menu besides each team and matchup opens up for edge case scenarios, such as dropping a team entirely.

A custom dashboard has the benefit of adjusting exactly what information is necessary for this type of event. No more of the bloated data — or lack of thereof — that proprietary sites rigidly conform to.

The calendar view is an easy way for staff to track a season’s progress, perfect for a hands-off approach. Since matches are organized between teams independently, it’s necessary to visualize where hiccups have not have been reported by players— lest they cause bigger issues down the line.

Ongoing tickets that pertain to individual matchups are represented by squares. These can be clicked to directly jump to the corresponding issue.

Much of the work done by staff during a season revolves around answering player-submitted tickets in a timely manner. Tickets you’ve chosen to handle are highlighted at the top of the screen, while filtering options are included in the case of an overwhelming number of open tickets. Sometimes certain issues are more urgent, even if they may not have been submitted first.

The main focus of this project was to craft the user experience and provide a number of prototypes. That said, I thought it was important for the deliverables to include a high-fidelity design of at least one section. While this isn't the main dashboard users will see when they first enter the application, it's a realistic demonstration of the style and direction.

There was a lot of back-and-forth between me and the rest of staff to nail down the user flow and necessary features. Prototypes of low fidelity wireframes were made to quickly hand-off realistic interfaces and identify pitfalls.

The dashboard is currently under development, meaning there's no hard conclusions to pull from. I did, however, gain valuable insights during the design process: