The Mainline Tournament Management System handles hundreds of concurrent tournaments, players, and admins.
Near the end of 2021, I was responsible for redesigning the Mainline Tournament Management System. I performed user research, prototyping, wireframing, interface design, and design system integration. As head of design I also led a team of designers and researchers.
Timeline and Contribution
Role
Senior Product Designer & Head of Design
Mainline began a partnership with several major esport organizations to be their exclusive tournament provider. These esport leagues wanted their administrators to run tournaments, but the system wasn’t designed for that functionality — it was designed to be a turn-key tournament provider. Mainline had no way to provide users admin rights to specific tournaments without giving them access to every tournament, team, or users information.
Problem
Because the entire system was being re-written, the opportunity to redesign the user interface, build in new admin features, and solve existing user experience problems presented itself. This case study represents a sample of what was accomplished during that time period.
Outcome
Navigation
Through feedback sessions with administrators, we learned that the global navigation on the current admin portal was severely lacking — admins weren’t able to quickly navigate to pages and features they commonly used during tournament administration. Instead, the admins were keeping multiple tabs open to save them valuable time. To remedy this, we designed a new global side bar navigation menu and included only the most prominent pages that admins heavily utilized.
Because there were multiple tournaments happening simultaneously, admins often had a hard time finding tournaments they were actively administrating. In some cases admins needed to find a completed tournament to review data, metrics, or user ranking. Adding in a global search feature allowed admins to quickly search for portals, arenas, or tournaments at any time.
Search
While working with engineering during the initial design stages, I spent a lot of time mapping out various user flows and systems. These helped better visualize our intended direction and were invaluable in gaining alignment between cross-functional teams.
System Mapping
Because the interface itself was redesigned, it was important that the existing design system get uplifted. All of the design system components were either revised with new style treatments or completely rebuilt, depending on their needs.
Design System