Stat Check — Critiquing League of Legends’ Match History Page
League of Legends is a free-to-play MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) game which pits teams of five players against each other. Each player controls one “champion”/character, and the object of the game is to destroy the opposing team’s base. Through a combination of 140+ different characters to choose, a seemingly infinite number of scenarios that play out each match, and the thrill of being able to skillfully outmanuever other players, it is no surprise that League of Legends draws over 11 million unique players each month.
When players are logged in but not currently playing a game, they are browsing the client — a program that allows you to browse the shop, check out news, chat with friends, and of course queue up for matches. One of the most important areas of the client is the “Match History” section.
On this page, players can view the results of their previous 20 matches with a few included stats — how long the game was, which game mode you played, and how much gold you earned, to name a few — which is adequate as a preview. It is possible to left-click on a match to pull-up the full details of the game, but in practice, most people simply use their match history as a way to gauge their performance in the past couple of games. Thus, there is no need to add details such as who else was in the match, which would also cause the screen to be unnecessarily busy.
On the right hand side there is an area displaying “Recently Played Champions” as well as the portraits of your most played. Below that, Match History displays the amount of games you played in a certain role (the game classifies champions into 6 different roles, all represented as icons here) using a bar graph. Considering that the sample size of Match History is fixed at 20 games, I don’t think that using percentages is a particularly useful way to display the Recently Played data — perhaps using a fraction (10/20, 7/20) or simply a flat number would make that information much clearer to the player.
As of now, the learnability and the memorability of the Match History UI is high, since there’s not really much you can do except scroll through your history. However, efficiency problems arise if the user wants to sort by different options. Currently, there is no way to organize the match history list by outcome (victory vs. loss), which character the user played, or even game mode. In the screenshot above, I have a mixture between the “Custom” game mode and the “Ranked/Solo Duo” game mode, and there is no way for me to only look at the results of one mode specifically. In another scenario, if a user was practicing a certain character over the course of several games and wanted to track his/her progress in the match history, there is no way to easily filter those results out either. Currently, if players want to get a useful, sortable match history interface, they must use external resources such as the website na.op.gg. Evident through the widespread popularity of OP.gg amongst new players and veterans, the addition of simple sort functions would increase the efficacy of the Match History page as well as its overall usefulness to players.
With all that in mind, here’s a touched up Match History page with a few extra elements:
In the top right corner, I’ve added some of the sort functions talked about earlier — you’d have the ability to sort by your game mode, what champion you played, the outcome of the game, and your performance grade. I decided to put it in the top right because most sort functions reside near the top of the page, like OP.gg. In addition, there was some space on the right hand side below “Recent Activity”, so I figured I would shift everything down a notch to make room for the sort functions. All of the sort options would be usable simultaneously, so if you wanted to find all the Ranked Solo/Duo matches in which you played Teemo and won, you could do that. I also changed the numbers beneath the “Recently Played” portraits to integers out of 20. Lastly, instead of having a “Sort by Role” dropdown box, I figured that you could make “Recent Activity” clickable, and by clicking you could sort your match history by which role you played. In this case, I highlighted the “Marksman” role, and all of my matches that I played as marksmen, combined with the sort categories I specified above, would be applied and the match history properly filtered.