Vertigo X

Overview

<aside> 📖 e-sport, noun: a multiplayer video game played competitively for spectators, typically by professional gamers.

</aside>

<aside> 📖 Battle Royale (BR): used in reference to Player Unknown Battlegrounds (PUBG) Mobile and Call of Duty: Mobile (CODM) BR style matches where there can be a maximum of 25 teams with 4 players each, making 100 players on the battle field.

</aside>

Vertigo X is a solution that makes it easy to organize and manage e-sport tournaments in Africa. The initial goal was two-fold:

• To bridge the gap between African players and tournaments, making it easy for players to create and join teams, enter tournaments and view the results of matches.
• To replace the previously existing methods of carrying out tournament organization tasks, making those tasks much easier to complete.

Prior to my working on this project, there were other solutions for these problems. But they did not cater for the African e-sports scene. So tournament players and organizers made use of manual, inefficient tools and methods to complete these tasks. We set out on this project to solve this problem with a product that rivaled what was existent on other continents.

This was the first major project I worked on as a product designer and it was the start of my growth from a designer who only valued beautiful UI into one who knows how to use design to solve problems and achieve a product's goal.

The two betas

The first beta of the product was designed and prototyped in October 2020. It took 3 weeks. Here's what it looked like:

Some screens from the first beta of the app.

The second beta came as a fully responsive web app (that can be installed as a Progressive Web App on any device and is still in development) with a UI refresh and a unification of the product and the Vertigo X brand. It also solved many of the flow problems we encountered based on community feedback while testing and using the first beta to organize tournaments.

Problems solved

I tackled three main problems that I discovered from my observations and interactions in the Vertigo X community of over 2000 PUBG Mobile and COD Mobile players. They are:

• team management: inviting/removing members, joining/leaving teams
• tournaments: entering tournaments, managing participants and matches; and
• results (adding results and viewing results).

Teams

A core part of a Battle Royale match is the fact that it is played with teams of four (or fewer) players. Players need to discover teams, teams need to recruit players, team captains need to be able to manage all their team players.