My team prepping for research
Problem
ELEAGUE is Turner Sports’ first foray into esports (professional video gaming). While we have staff that have a deep background in the industry, we weren’t 100% sure what the fans thought of our digital experiences. Being a scrappy startup within a large corporation, there wasn’t room in the budget to pay for a full-fledged research study.
Goal
Gain findings on our event microsites and new Watch page from qualitative research with ELEAGUE fans
Process
Since we didn’t have a research budget, I had to figure out a way to screen users to make sure we were talking to our target audience. Thankfully, in 2018 we produced a large number of competitions on-site at Turner Studios. We also had a “pre-game” fan experience set up for each of the events, where fans could mingle, get autographs from players, buy merchandise, and get hyped up before they went in to watch the action. We had our most die-hard fans literally sitting outside our door waiting to watch esports! It was too good of an opportunity to pass up.
I talked with our Product and Business teams and got their approval to set up a user testing station as part of the pre-game activities. I worked with our UX Research team to develop a clear test plan, and secured a license with Lookback to record the sessions. The two UXers on my team and I manned the table over the 5 weeks of events and conducted short-form (10-15 minute) sessions with more than 30 people.
Once the sessions were complete, we used Lookback to clip the most interesting moments from the sessions and prepared a findings deck to review with the broader ELEAGUE team.
Results / Next Steps
We gained some great insights by talking with these super fans. The fans clearly understood and liked our new Watch page and had constructive feedback on how to make our event microsites more engaging. These were the output reports that I put together.
NOTE: There are PDFs, the original Keynote files has video clips so that stakeholders can see and hear feedback straight from the fans!
We also got some nice overall feedback about ELEAGUE on TBS:
“[ELEAGUE] …it’s also validation and credibility for a hobby that I’ve had and loved for so long. So to see it get, not just Primetime, but, … for a network, to actually show on TV, I’m like ‘Wow!’”