Unikrn Match Page

Motivation

One unique opportunity eSports provide sportsbooks is that all eSport matches are streamed online for free. While most sports are televised and kept off the internet, we were able to allow users to watch the matches they bet on. We let users dive into each match on the site to watch the stream when it started, but didn't do much else with that page.

After talking to several users as part of a tangentially-related usability study, I came across an interesting finding: people who visit that page wanted more than just a stream. They wanted to see stats on each team, relating both to individual players and the team's performance in general. After talking to the team, I started doing more research on what stats users were interested in, what stats could help a user feel like he or she is placing an informed bet, and what data we could get from different APIs. We focused on the stats that lie where the three intersected, and came up with a great spectator experience.

Approach

I began by interviewing several eSport fans about what information they wished they could get about teams and players that weren't being supplied by the stream. Unikrn had managed to gather some of the biggest eSport fanatics in the world to look at their company, so I was able to talk to team members about what kind of research they do on a match, in addition to several people who were not affiliated with Unikrn. After conducting interviews and brainstorming sessions, I utilized an affinity diagram to organize my findings.

Implementation

As we were adding a huge feature to the site, I had to do some sitemapping to figure out how the new pages would fit into the site.

With Dota presenting the most opportunity for spectator enhancement, we decided to focus on improving the match page for Dota matches first. I had also discovered that user's want different stats before a game, when they are placing a bet, than they do during the game or after the game. Most importantly, they wanted to know how the teams match up against each other, and whether each team is on a winning or losing streak. With this in mind, we decided to show each team's global ranking, past five game results, and previous match-ups.

During a game, users are more interested in how each player is doing. We pulled this information from the Dota API and let users know what each player was building, how much gold they had accrued, and how many times they had gotten a kill or been killed.

After a match, users were a little more split in what they wanted. Some just wanted a quick rundown of what happened in the game, while others wanted a way to re-watch the game in its entirety. We decided to show a video of the concluded match, which team won, how each player performed in game, as well as total team kills and team gold.

Of course, Unikrn is a betting website, so we had to encourage users to place bets. The match detail page presented a great opportunity for us to showcase not just head to head matches, but also a variety of exotic markets as well.  I took this opportunity to clean up a few known issues with the betslip as well.

Results

After the changes went through, we saw a huge increase in betting: over 120%. We also saw people spending longer on the site: average session duration increased 30% in the month after the launch.