stratless
stratless
stratless
product & ux/ui designer
january 2021 - october 2021
Stratless was an idea for an esports team management platform that would also offer scrimmage organization and in-game performance monitoring features.
The project was halted in late 2021 after team members got new jobs, graduated, and so on.
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Managing an esports team is more stressful than it should be. (As a previous Overwatch team manager for 4 years, I would know.)
A team Discord server is great, but lacks functionality past messaging and notifications. There’s no way to visualize what needs to get done without turning to spreadsheets, documents, and emails... and what if the players are disorganized, unresponsive, or lack punctuality? -
The entirety of the professional esports world relies on Discord server channels where managers post markdown text requests to “scrim” (scrimmage) against other teams. Listings are just a single line tossed into a sea of other messages and are more than often misread.
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Endless spreadsheets, emails, links, Discord posts… there’s simply too much to keep track of, especially when you need to wrangle 3-5 pro gamers who are playing a video game 8+ hours a day. You’re too busy to keep track of all these links, and so are they.
Market Problems
Our solution: Provide the tools an esports org needs to operate a team…
all in one product. Enter Stratless.
Communication
Response-driven team communication tools that use Discord/game API integrations to ensure players are up-to-date with the latest info.
Scrims
Search hubs for scrims that filter entries to remove any scheduling confusion. Live scrim monitoring (sans gameplay) and results for performance record-keeping.
Management
Easy personnel management for ever-changing rosters with file hosting abilities for tournament forms and travel documents.
Feature Design Spec
co-written with Noah Kim, Kevin John Post, and Tucker Watson in 2021 with the intention of translating most listed features 1:1 into a functional prototype.
Each accordion menu was a design experience goal: they were things we wanted our users to be able to achieve with Stratless.
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Create a team of players, managers, and administrators for a specific game.
Each role should have defined permissions.
Create a new organization or find an existing organization.
Request to be verified as an official team of an organization.
Manage organization’s page, public information.
Create a player account for a user.
Player accounts represent who a user plays as in a game. For example, Tuck plays Valorant as “Tucker”.
Performance, match participation, team memberships, etc., are all linked to player profiles so that they can be tracked even if a player doesn’t have a user account, i.e. in tournaments where some teams may not be using Stratless but we still want to track their players.
Invite users to a team as a staff member, player, etc.
Manage users, edit memberships, deactivate, etc.
Create a group to organize members of an organization.
Groups are used for permissions; administrators can modify settings in the team and invite users, managers handle groups and player accounts.
Groups will also be used for document management.
Additional groups can be created for organization.
Player profiles should contain logistical information, such as contact info, team associations, etc.
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Create LFS (looking for scrim) listings that contain timezone-aware date and time and map pool (include/exclude/no preference).
View LFS listings on a hub, creating scrim listings searches for scrims that match in time and maps for convenience.
There can be multiple hubs for different purposes, e.g. an official tier 1 hub whose participants are managed by Stratless or a private hub managed by a couple teams.
Teams can request to book LFS requests and the hosting team can choose which of the requesting teams they want to scrim with.
Booking requests will include team info and potentially details such as average ratings, preferred agents, maps.
Book requests can be cancelled prior to scrim, etc.
Client-side tools will be provided to facilitate scrims; the scrim leader will be able to invite users to their party, record match data to the team’s match history.
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Data from all recorded scrims and official matches can be imported into Stratless via their respective workflows.
Official matches can be loaded into the system via their public match ID, since they are not hidden from player careers the same way.
Detailed statistics from each match will be provided with graphical displays.
Data can also be exported for local analysis.
We will also support aggregated analysis over multiple matches; matches can be grouped by series, map, lineup, etc.
Views will be provided to see team and individual performance for both.
We’ll implement heat maps for kill locations, ability usage, plants, and all other information we can access.
There will also be more complex statistics, such as KAST, trade times, kill contribution, ADR, ACS, etc.
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Create calendar events similar to Google calendar.
Share the event with groups and users in the team.
See upcoming events and related series’ or scrims directly from the team dashboard.
Check in to upcoming events, such as scrims.
Share an event with another team, such as a tournament series or scrim.
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Associate documents with the team, team groups, and team members for everything from announcements to performance reports.
Documents have permissions and can be managed dynamically.
Some more examples:
Simple Markdown notes can be privately associated with a player’s performance in a match as a performance report.
VODs can be uploaded to the match archive as video documents.
Managers can share PDF forms and legal documents so that players can have access to them in a consolidated place.
Tasks can be given to team members and groups by managers.
Tasks can have deadlines and will report their status to the assigner.
Team members can see their tasks in the dashboard as a simple checklist. Non-players (i.e. managers and above) should have the ability to make an announcement to the rest of the team.
Announcements should include response actions for the intended audiences.
Annoucements should also feature a read receipt/confirmation signal for the reader to send to the author.
Wireframe Mockups
These are general wireframes that I produced in 2023 using Figma to reflect most states of our design goals.
In particular, these screens focus on fleshing out parts of the goals of having our managers organize users into roles and teams, use a communication system, schedule calendar events for the team, and coordinate scrims with other teams.
Old Wireframes
The following wireframes were produced in 2021 and have not been visually or functionally refreshed to match the state of the 2023 wireframes. However, they still represent a good amount of Stratless’ ideal feature scope that has not yet been produced with the new wireframe library and updated UX.