AimLabs (Mobile designs)
AimLabs is a community hub designed to take the user’s gaming abilities and experience to the moon.
My role: Product Designer
Deliverables: User Flow, Wireframes
Tools Used: Figma
Timeline: April 2022 to December 2022
Collaborators: Jonah Bitautas - VP of User Experience, Platforms
Prototype for Sign Up
The Challenge
AimLabs is a web based platform that provides free-game specific training courses taught by pros. People have the ability to share clips of their games for feedback from coaches. Along with the free version of the platform, users have the ability to sign up for Aimlabs+, premium service designed for FPS gamers, granting access to a whole new class of training tools, such as:
Run It Back - practicing the exact circumstances of a death users experienced in Valorant, but in Aim Lab.
Access to new Valorant maps in Aim Lab's Creator Studio for users to build their own training & warm-up scenarios.
Trend-based training to target user’s weaknesses, game-specific advanced metrics such as a crosshair placement score.
While the focus is on game training courses, there is a social media aspect side to Aimlabs. Users have the ability to see any posts creators (aka coaches and pro gamers) make, as well as being able to discover creators or hashtags to follow.
The Approach
To understand user needs as well as how a social media application aimed towards gamers would work, I began a deep dive into regular social media and entertainment applications, such as Twitter , Twitch, and Tik Tok. Twitter’s navigation, as well as Tik Tok’s was something of interest to both me and Jonah as we planned on having Aimlabs to have quite a few navigation items.
We were able to access our potential users via Discord. Gathering a small amount of users (namely the coaches because they were going to be the main creators of the platform), we were able to ask them what features they had expected from the platform. As with any social media site, users had said the ability to post and share content was most important. After identifying this as one the main user needs, I set off to look at Twitter and Tik Tok on mobile, since my primary design focus was on mobile designs.
The Discovery
From the interviews, we were able to determine that coaches/creators:
Want the ability to set their own prices for their course,
Provide coaching services either 1 on 1 or be able to look through videos that their students uploaded.
Create posts that their students can see and be informed about any upcoming courses.
For the regular user themselves their main focus was getting help from coaches, so:
Access to coaches, whether it be 1 on 1 coaching or uploading videos of themselves for review.
Being notified of any potential new courses by coaches.
The Vision
What we wanted for Aimlabs was similar to what we wanted for Playerbase - to create a community while providing access to resources to the user’s gaming skills. We wanted to provide a platform that was free and accessible to everyone, while also focusing on building revenue by having a premium version that provided an ad free experience across the entirety of Aimlabs, early access to exclusive bootcamps, as well as exclusive in game skins.
Framework (User flows)
Before starting on designs, Jonah and I wanted to plan out exactly how certain processes worked, such as the user signing up as well as being able to purchase credits since that was a new option users didn’t have before.
Ideation and Inspiration
Since we were taking inspiration from Twitter and Tik Tok, I used the navigation for the two as a basis for the navigations for Aimlabs. I also happen to not have Tik Tok downloaded, so had to ask my friend for help with this (haha).
Mobile Nav explorations
Since Aimlabs was going to have many navigation items, I really had to think of various ways for the navigation to be displayed and interacted with. Below are screenshots of the desktop navigations for Aimlabs that I was trying to figure out how it would best be displayed.
Lofi Designs
Final Designs
Aimlabs is a web based application that seeks to provide a community and resources to gamers. Creators and coaches are able to share their content freely across Aimlabs or sell their content. Regular users are able to create and share content, upload public videos of their gameplay (non subscribed users have to pay), as well as having access to courses and bootcamps to were previously pay-walled (now free!) Premium users have advanced access to bootcamps and courses three months before their release, unlimited AI created training tasks, and exclusive in-game skins.
Dark Mode
While the light mode version of Aimlabs was complete, I started working on the dark mode version. I honestly prefer dark mode because it causes less strain on the eye, so I was glad I had the opportunity to start working on a dark mode version. Unfortunately, while in the middle of working on a dark mode version, I was laid off from Statespace, so I wasn’t able to see the completion on the dark mode version.
More explorations
Along with dark mode, I was also exploring how tables would look on mobile. I began doing some research into how various companies converted their table to mobile, and it does vary according to what type of data needs to be displayed. My first thought was to do keep the width of the table and to have the user do a horizontal scroll (this is also very easy to develop), but the issue was that it would hide the data, which we didn’t want. As this was a table keeping record of the user’s data based on the task they played, the date, who the task was from, as well as their score, we wanted there to be an easy way to compare new and old data. An option I discovered was to turn the table into cards. This allowed for better digestion of information, while also being able to compare data easily.
Conclusion
Aimlabs stemmed out of a realization that having a platform focused only on coaching for esports was too broad, and so in order to narrow that scope, we decided to include coaching options as part of an overall merge of the Statespace products. While my work on mobile designs was cut short due to lay offs, I think that Aimlabs provides a great service to gamers, and would have loved to see the product grow.