Xbox Arena

 
 
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DEFINE

Bringing eSports to the Xbox platform began with the hero scenarios of (1) creating a tournament and (2) finding and joining a tournament. Starting with discovery, we looked at all the places users would encounter the Arena feature and how it could be celebrated to various user types.

The key performance indicators were to increase monthly active users and time spent in the Xbox ecosystem. Starting late in the calendar year, the goal was to have support for an E3 reveal. The longer term goals were to have a rich spectate experience. The feature would service both the Xbox console as well as the Xbox App for PC and mobile.

 

IDEATE

Breaking down the hero scenarios, ideation explored:

  • Registration and invites flow

    • pending invites, queuing, and accepting and requesting invites

  • Visualizations and layout for team pages

    • Brackets and content pre/during/post tournaments

  • Team creation + Looking For Group

 

FUTURE INTEGRATION IDEATION

Looking forward for Arena, exploration and ideation continued in conjunction with the LFG (Looking For Group) feature on the Xbox platform. Pairing LFG with team creation would allow for single players to connect with each other when social constructs did not otherwise exist (large social graph, first-time and casual tournament users.) Looking specifically at flows to support:

  • LGF creation

  • Vetting requests to join group

  • Finding a tournament LFG

  • Tournament LFG request was accepted

 

MY CONCLUSION

After the 2016 E3 launch in partnership with Killer Instinct, further work on the project was focused on partnerships. In that time I moved on to other product work within Xbox Design Research & Development. 

Arena was beta tested in the Xbox console and Xbox App for PC ecosystems with tournaments for Killer Instinct.

 
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