A New Way to Engage with Professional League of Legends

Alexa, who is winning the current LCS match?

Cloud 9 is ahead of TSM by 2000 gold, one dragon, and two towers.

Let's go! Alexa, what is Cloud 9's standing in the LCS?

Cloud 9 is in 2nd place in the LCS summer split.

Features

Interactions

Our core set of interactions revolve around engaging with the stats reported during live games. We wanted to provide players with a new way to experience the game, whether they are able to watch it or not. Here are some of the queries possible during live games:

Which team has Baron?
What is {player}’s K/D/A?
Which team has more gold?
Which team is winning?
Who is playing in the current game?
What champion is {player} playing?
How much health does {player} have?
Which player has the most gold?

Reminders

We know that people lead busy lives, and it can be hard to keep up with the schedule of professional League of Legends given how many games happen in such a short period of time. We wanted to find a way to help players keep up with their favorite teams. With the help of the Alexa Reminders API, we added the ability to create reminders that seamlessly integrate with the rest of the Alexa Reminders system. You can add a reminder for an upcoming game by saying, “Alexa, add a reminder for {Team}’s next game.” As it gets closer to the game, Alexa will have a notification for you that your team’s game is coming up.

Our Journey

Ideation

Our problem statement is: How might League of Legends (LoL) players achieve alternative ways to engage with LoL Esports data so that they can increase their interaction and engagement with the game?

We wanted to find a new way for players to engage with the immense amount of data available with League of Legends Esports. We decided to create an Alexa Skill, as it allows us to let LoL Esports fans engage deeper with the game while watching, as well as support keeping up with the games even when they can't watch.

We immediately began dreaming up potential interactions. We suspected that it would feel magical to ask questions like, “Which team has the most gold?”, “Which player has the most kills?”, “What’s Cloud 9’s standing??” and more. We had large dreams of including additional features, like: Streaming game audio to the Alexa device, covering every region’s league, and adding the ability to vote which team will win. However, we scoped down to the essentials of what we needed to prove this concept for Riot Games: Queries about standings, in game stats, and reminders for upcoming games. We confirmed our assumptions that these were the most important during our user testing.

User Testing

Our goal was to create something that inspires joy and excitement for our users. Throughout our project we have been checking in with potential users of our Alexa Skill to ensure that we are going down the right path.

Our earliest stage of user testing consisted of surveys and interviews. We first validated our concept by gaining insights on if an Alexa Skill was a way users would like to engage with our data. We found that a healthy 30% of LoL Esports fans in our sample already used an Alexa device, and would be excited to try out a new skill.

Once we began fleshing out the ideas for the different interactions users can have with our skill, we went back to our users and asked what interactions they were interested in and if they had any ideas for new interactions. We confirmed that many of our ideas for existing players were sound, but we also needed to think about how to phrase the questions for newer players and watchers of Esports.

Our final sessions of user testing consisted of essentially asynchronous interviews conducted through UserTesting.com. Here we worked with people of varying levels of familiarity with LoL, but were Esports fans. We learned what sort of phrases people would expect to say to Alexa, and what output they expected. This helped us with our voice interaction design, resulting in a more intuitive, conversational interaction.

Result

We started our project by doing a lot of research into how an Alexa Skill is made. Thankfully, there was no need to worry about natural language processing (NLP), due to being handled in the cloud by Amazon. However, there were significant hurdles we came across, and eventually overcame. From spotty documentation, to learning new technologies, to building the most complex system we have designed in school so far. This was an incredible learning experience, and thankfully it resulted in an exciting project for us, and a great product for our sponsor to test.