OVERVIEW
Galorants is a matchmaking app for helping female-identifying Valorant players find teammates to combat sexism within competitive gaming.
Valorant is a free online first-person shooter (FPS) game where teams of five must work together to achieve victory. But due to majority of the toxic male player base, women often avoid playing by themselves as it is common to experience sexism and harassment from strangers. The app is designed for and inspired by the existing Galorants Discord community (logo created by server member December) to introduce and further female involvement in esports.
ROLE
Product Designer
UX Researcher
TOOLS
Figma
Adobe Photoshop
DURATION
May - June 2021
THE PROBLEM
How can we encourage women to competitively play games in a male-dominated space that often leads to sexism and harassment?
Research shows that lack of social support and frequent bullying lead to female-identifying gamers playing alone, staying anonymous, and moving groups regularly. This has resulted in lack of female representation within gaming.
Process
RESEARCH
Context Study
User Pain Points
User Interviews
ANALYSIS
Personas
Use Cases
Problem Statement
IDEATION
Lo-fi Mockup
Feature Narrative
DESIGN
Wireframes
Prototype
FEEDBACK
User Testing
Designer Critiques
CONCLUSION
Assess Findings
Reflections
STATISTICS
SURVEY
To better understand my target audience, I conducted a survey asking respondents to explain their negative experiences playing Valorant as a girl, as well as if there are any features they’d like to see in a mobile girls Valorant app.
I sent out a survey to the Galorants Discord community asking the following:
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Have you encountered any negative experiences as a girl? If so, please explain.
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What features would you like to see in a mobile application meant to help women have a better Valorant experience?
A common trend among the responses was that female players choose not to use voice chat at all in fear of being harassed. One even described how she's witnessed cyberbullying just for having a “feminine” username, which aligns with the statistics above. In terms of app development, others suggested creating a verification process to avoid troll accounts.
Research
Analysis
PERSONAS
Our target audience are female Valorant players 17-24 years old. I built these user personas to help guide my design thinking:
Emily, 18
GOALS
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To learn and master FPS mechanics
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To start an all-girls team at her university's Valorant club
PAIN POINTS
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Felt uncomfortable practicing gameplay in fear of being criticized by other players
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Struggled to find girls from her school that were also interested in joining a Valorant team
USER TESTING
Based on my research, I brainstormed all possible filters and functions that could help personalize the user experience. Since a fundamental aspect of the application’s design is the matchmaking process, I focused on understanding and organizing what types of questions and filters should be incorporated.
Thanks to the feedback of my classmates, I was able to identify three pain points from my initial mockup:
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Finding a way to make the “chill/rage” scale for players less daunting
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Establishing some sort of security system to verify the user is a girl
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Making the amount of personal info to fill out less overwhelming
I kept these responses in mind as I began the ideation phase and thinking through how to collect information in a way that didn't overwhelm, stress or make users feel uncomfortable navigating the app.
Ideation
SKETCHES
While making the user’s profile picture is effective for dating applications, I realized that this is not the same case for gaming. After surveying Valorant friends about what would be the most important thing they’d look for when recruiting a teammate, the most common response was their best agent(s) they can play.
My goal was to create a more personalized experience for users, depending on if they are looking for a team or recruiting for their team.
To bring the excitement of esports to the application, I wanted to give users the option to personalize their profile with a team name, icon, and preferences.
Similarly, individual players have the option to upload a profile pic, write a bio about themselves, and link their social media handles.
But since this information is not crucial to recruiting Valorant players, I left these features optional to fill out.
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TEAM INFO
Teams’ personal info screens include team name, Valorant usernames, region, and average rank.
The teammate preferences are used for better matchmaking with individual players.
PLAYER INFO
Individual players’ personal info screens
include username, region, current rank,
top agent(s), preferred game modes,
preferred communication, and playstyle.
VERIFYING IDENTITY
To minimize trolls and spam accounts, I enabled phone number verification. In the future, I would love to implement better security to prove the user is not male!
Design Features
MATCHMAKING
The matchmaking screen is designed so the player’s profile picture and top three agents are displayed equally, along with the rest of their info.