When we follow soccer, baseball, or any other professional sports, we go to a central source to get information, learn more about teams and players, and talk about these with other fans. As eSports fans, we want that same place that traditional sports has, but for what we care about — eSports. That’s how Instant eSports began.

Growing up in Korea, the country where eSports began, the idea clicked with me the moment I met Rick and Jonathan from Kairos Society in 2013 (and later, Sebastian) — the founders of Instant eSports. I’ve been helping them with the first version of the design since last year as a contractor, and two months ago, I joined full-time as a Lead Designer. Since then, the team worked hard to redesign the entire app from the ground up to create the best experience for following eSports on mobile.

Shaping the Direction

Every product should start with a goal and a result that can be measured. Our goal was to build the best way for fans to keep up with eSports, with the success metric of of bringing up retention and engagement of the app. Since we launched Instant eSports last May, we have seen steady growths in user base, but the growth rate in engagement was turtling. The app had lots of features, but it wasn’t sticky.

The problem was that old Instant eSports experience ends at just getting the updates. User would open the app, check the news, see a few match results, very few would search and follow some players, and… leave. Each features were powerful, but discrete.