Yahoo eSports
eSports has become insanely popular, with tens of millions of people tuning in to watch their favorite teams compete for huge prizes in games like League of Legends, Counter-Strike: GO, and Call of Duty. Even professional sports teams are signing eSports stars. Yahoo has taken a slice of the pie with the Yahoo eSports service, which provides fans with real-time coverage of the biggest events, expert commentary, tournament analysis, and more. 

Purpose

Yahoo eSports is part of Yahoo's continued investment to provide the best sports content and experiences on Yahoo Sports. Yahoo eSports was created to dedicate to esports coverage of major videogames and events. Yahoo eSports covers live gaming tournaments, focusing on players and competitions with commentary, interviews, and in-depth features. It also maintains industry-wide calendars, stats, and player rankings. Yahoo eSports is a new premier destination for delivering professional Esports coverage across major games and events, coupled with a comprehensive and interactive product experience.

Roll & Challenges

I am responsible for: Visual design, UI, and UX of Yahoo Esports. In Mar 2016, I successfully completed the mission of launching the pc/mobile web service in 3 months. I set the project's direction through several interviews with target audiences, and we were able to find many interesting points and their clear characteristics. Based on these results, I was able to move fast to achieve the goal.
They have a favorite game clearly and strong loyalty to the pro-gamers. They strongly wanted to be provided with information related to these in real-time. For that, we offered icons based on the logos of games and professional teams to help them find the information intuitively.
They enjoyed the game and preferred the dark environment to focus on the screen for a long time in the dark environment and concentrate on the game. Yahoo always uses a white background, but only Yahoo eSports allows a dark background in video views to reduce eye strain when users watch videos in a dark environment.

Yahoo’s eSports created its own video content with editors including Andrea Rene, Travis Gafford, Taylor Cocke, Dylan Walker, and Michael Martin, who have backgrounds from IGN, GameSport, Kotaku, GameStop TV, and more.
See more here: https://youtu.be/rBb4WDxNq5w

Auto-generated highlight clips

There were already portals that collected information about games and professional teams. However, we found that they wanted to be provided with real-time updated tournament information, schedule and result of the tournaments, and game highlights. Also, they didn't have the patience to watch the video to the end, so they wanted to skip the video and watch only the highlights where they could learn the game's skills. 
We tried various techniques to create a short video featuring the game's highlights to satisfy them. We've implemented a technique that automatically generates memes through a technique that picks out highlights from a video with a rave sound and visual effects.

Yahoo eSports presented a technique for detecting highlights from live streaming videos of game matches. Most video games use pronounced sound and visual effects to emphasize highlight moments.

Enjoy together and cheer together!

We provided a live chat feature for fans to connect with each other and root for their favorite teams and added a gaming element where users can cheer for their team by clicking on the team icon at the top of the chat window. Through this, users could feel watching the game together and cheering together. Users can listen to each other's opinions through a real-time survey, and editors have answered live questions to increase user participation.

Yahoo eSports provided features such as live chatting, games, and surveys where users could cheer for their favorite team while watching live games.

Native App

We Launched the Android and iOS App, bringing scores, breaking news, and highlights from the biggest events in gaming. The app also offers live streams and recorded videos from top games, players, and events in high-definition. Users can turn on notifications to receive alerts for live matches as well as score updates. 

Exploration options for the Next Version eSports

The next version was to deliver innovative game information while users watch live games. Each game required different information, and it was to provide more dynamic live game information by customized rich and graphical infographics that fit the tone and manner of the game. We prepared it for not only the desktop version but also the native app.