cBracket

cBracket is an innovative app designed to empower users in creating, facilitating, and discovering events for grassroots, local competitive gaming tournaments. Serving as a dynamic hub, it connects individuals passionate about hosting or participating in gaming events, fostering a vibrant gaming community.


My Role
As the team lead, acting as the Scrum Master, I oversaw task assignments for design and research and facilitated our bi-daily meetings (standups). During these standups, we reviewed completed work and charted our course forward. While leading the team, I also played a pivotal role in making numerous design decisions.


The Market:
The Problem:
The rise of E-Sports has catapulted it into the mainstream, with large-scale tournaments now garnering millions of viewers. However, the landscape for smaller, local tournaments remains fragmented and disorganized. Most local gaming events rely on outdated methods like dry-erase boards or cumbersome Excel spreadsheets, which are far from user-friendly, especially on mobile devices.

Our Solution
We aim to bridge this gap in the market by offering a streamlined solution for finding and managing competitive gaming events. Our platform provides a user-friendly experience, simplifying the process for both event organizers and participants. By offering intuitive tools and interfaces, we strive to create engaging and accessible experiences for all involved.
Assumptions
To ensure alignment within the team, we utilized affinity mapping at the outset and throughout each sprint. Unlike traditional design methods, Lean UX doesn't begin with research. Instead, we focused on establishing our assumptions, revisiting them multiple times to validate or refine based on subsequent research and user testing.

We considered:

The desired business outcomes.

The target users and their needs.

The key user outcomes that drive engagement.

The essential features required for the app's functionality.

Creating An Event
Embarking on event hosting can be daunting. From defining parameters to organizing brackets, numerous barriers can hinder progress. With cBracket, users are effortlessly guided through this process in just a few simple steps.


Finding an Event
This was an area of prototyping that underwent a lot of revision, challenging many of our assumptions.


We knew we would have to filter the results somehow, thanks to our weekly sessions of user testing we were able to determine every factor that is considered when searching for a fun gaming event.


Facilitating an Event
When establishing our assumptions early in the process, we felt that this feature would be most important. Our interviews reinforced that the most troubling part of facilitating an event was keeping up with the current match and overall bracket.

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Surprisingly, the most difficult stage of prototyping this feature was determining how to display an entire event's bracket in a vertical scrolling format, while being quickly understandable.