Scholastic Esports
A safe, supportive space for schools to build, manage, and win with esports teams.
We worked with Vanta over 7 months to redesign and launch several key areas of the application: The Arena, The Matchups Page, and The Coaching Marketplace.
Vanta sells a team management platform for middle and high schools. Athletic directors can sign up, add gamers to teams, then register those teams to compete locally or nationally in highly competitive tournaments.
A Vanta team can view their matchups and join a Video arena for practices and games. If the opponent doesn't show up, a team can queue up to scrimmage against another team of the same level. Gamers also have access to a marketplace of professional coaches.
The ecosystem for scholastic gaming looks a lot like any scholastic athletics program. The gamers are the stars, they use the platform to scout opponents and find coaches to improve their skills. Coaches and Admins manage the team creation and league signups process. Parents are encouraged to follow along with Read Only accounts.
"I came to Vanta because I wanted to practice making friends with other gamers. My mom wanted to make sure the environment was safe so there wouldn't be bullies."
Vanta had built up a reserve of enthusiastic coaches for their growing base of gamers, but the initial attempt at launching the marketplace hadn't lived up to expectations. We set out to re-launch with a more robust, and detailed interface. By distributing a Google Form to the roster of coaches we were able to fill out descriptive profiles of each coach, asking questions we had gathered from interviews with young gamers and their parents.
The majority of a gamer's interaction with the platform should happen in the arena. We wanted to make sure the interface was familiar and easy to learn. The simplicity of the interface was part of an intentional effort to improve the latency of the gaming experience, our arena needed to be faster and more dependable than the big name competitors or users would rely on those.
Most team coaches are teachers as well, their busy schedules mean that when an opposing school doesn't show up to a match there needs to be some way to make use of the time. We introduced a Queue system during popular match times so that free teams can quickly join a lobby and start playing.
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