2 weeks
Research, Wireframes, Visual Design
Clubs have had minimal support from Riot with the only update within the past three years being raising the maximum cap of members from 50 to 100. Clubs so far have only been valued as a way to show a secondary “in game name” with the unique club tags. Many clubs have little to no internal activity, and other than obtaining the club tag, there is no other incentive to join one.
A recent post on the League of Legends subreddit about the current state of clubs has brought up a discussion of what features people would like to see implemented and complaints that they have about clubs. I used this post, along with opinions from friends that play League of Legends, to conduct my user research. You can view this post here.
The top two comments on the reddit post state that:
all the clubs i’m in have almost zero chatting going even when they are fully populated
u/Sirlami
Got to say, Riot’s biggest failure is the social aspect of this game. I’ve been playing for 4 years now I think.. I can’t recall the last time I actually chatted with anybody in this game.
u/tbwynne
Clubs have been promoted as a “social hub [that] facilitates friendships and naturally provides a place to organize games.”, but according to testimonies from the comment chains, clubs have not been used for that purpose.
People also voiced out their opinion on wanting a way to search for clubs. “Clubs need to be searchable and clubs need an option to allow you to join openly without an invite.”
After interviewing my friends(who are all active League of Legends players) on their perspective of clubs, I found out that a vast majority of them joined a club just for the club tag. None of them could remember the last time they actually chatted with another via the club chat function.
Currently, clubs are very bare. The Home tab only has a message of the day, while the Members tab shows a list of members in that club. Clubs offer no interactivity for its members, giving no incentive for members to engage with the community.
I decided to implement some of the features from my brainstorming to make clubs something that encourages interaction with other members on a daily basis.
HOME
Solo missions are already incorporated into League of Legends. However, with the introduction of Weekly Missions, clubs have an incentive to play together and work towards a common goal.
The about tab now includes a description of the club, along with the officers and the owner (1) so that new/interested members can contact them directly.
Accomplishing a mission grants all members of the club a reward such as skin shards, along with club aesthetic rewards such as banners/flags. There is a description of the current mission and a progress indicator around the mission icon.
I added a competitive element to Weekly Missions so that members are further incentivized to compete with others within the club for greater rewards. This section shows the top 3 players who have contributed the most towards the current mission.
The user's contribution towards the mission will always be viewable on this screen. This is for members that are not within the top 3 contributors and would like to see what their current progress is.
MEMBERS
Previously, there were a members, pending, and notifications tab for the members section of the club. I condensed this down into a members and pending tab. The pending tab would handle all pending invitations and requests to join the club.
HIGHLIGHTS
The highlights tab allows users to directly upload clips from their replays. Similar to Youtube and Reddit, users are able to view, comment, and “like” or “dislike” highlights.
Each row contains the champion that the uploader was playing, their summoner name, the title of the clip, the date that the highlight was uploaded, and the “popularity” score. This score is created by subtracting the number of “thumbs up” by the number of “thumbs down”.
Users are able to vote on the highlights by clicking the “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” emotes. These emotes are from the League of Legends game.
Users can type in their comments in the chatbox next to the video. It shows the user’s summoner icon, username, and comment.
CHAT
Although clubs already have a chat feature, my rendition allows the owner and officers to create channels so that members can have conversations in a channel that they care about. The left side shows what channel that you’re currently on by the gold border around the channel and shows the channels where you have notifications.
On the right is where the conversations take place. Users can easily type and talk to one another.
LOOKING FOR GAME (LFG)
The Looking for Game or LFG tab is for club members to easily join games other club members have created. Each row shows the player who is hosting the game, the game mode, the game type, and the current number of players in the lobby. If the player icons are green, that means that there is space left for others to join. If the icons are red, that means that the lobby is full.
Overall, I believe that adding in these elements to clubs will allow for a greater social experience. League of Legends has already helped me bond with so many other people and I would like to see others be able to do the same.