Coaching Content for Valorant Players
IRP x Sentinels Collaboration
Designing a new website to market the collaboration with successful Valorant coaching service, IRP, and world renowned e-sports team, Sentinels
The Project: Combine the 2 brand identities for IRP and Sentinels to create a hub for their collaboration, including a launch page and sales modals to drive interest in the exclusive coaching content made by professional Valorant players to help players of all levels climb ranks faster
Background
IRP is a premium coaching program built for players who want to improve quickly.
Sentinels is a world-renowned premier esports organization, known for their success in Valorant, Apex Legends, and Halo.
With this new collaboration, Sentinels is working in tandem with IRP to create pre-recorded coaching content and coordinate live coaching sessions for players of all levels to learn from the best Valorant players around.
Time & Scope
Discovery & Early Research
Competitive Analysis
User Research
Iterative Design
Experimental Launch Testing
Time: 1 month
Tools:
Project Management: Asana
Design: Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud
Testing: Maze
Collaboration: Discord
For this project, I was the sole designer assigned to this project - as such, I acted as design lead, user researcher, content designer, and advocate for the user’s experience. Apart from receiving initial visual asset materials from the development team, I acted independently apart from the feedback phases and handoff for implementation.
I worked very closely with the founder and head coach of IRP in order to ensure the content was accurate and would be engaging with IRP’s target audience.
My Role
User Interviews + Preliminary Research, Competitive Analysis
Brainstorming + Whiteboarding, Early Ideation
Interaction Design and Content Strategy
Iterative Design Approach: Double Diamond
A/B Testing and Product Launch
What I Did
Context
Valorant is an online first person shooter (FPS) game developed by Riot that has taken the world by storm. With a low barrier of entry but extremely high skill ceiling with a surprising amount of mechanical depth, playing Valorant and climbing its ranks from Bronze to Radiant is an addictive experience. But, it’s not easy.
With 4-6 million daily players, and 20-35 million monthly players, the competition is steep! Climbing Valorant ranks is known to be a long and arduous process, and can be very difficult to do on your own - hours upon hours of practice and ranked matches.
Without guidance, many plateau on their rank climbing journey and eventually give up. Immortal Roadmap Program (IRP) provides players of all levels, from amateur to aspiring professional, with guided and tailored coaching materials to supplement players on their rank climb.
IRP has the rare opportunity to collaborate with the world-renowned professional e-sports team, Sentinels, to create exclusive coaching content and allow clients to learn directly from the best players in the world. This content includes pe-recorded coaching tutorials and materials, live Q&A sessions, and dedicated 1:1 coaching!
With this exciting collaboration, IRP needs a platform to market the collaboration and make subscriptions accessible to interested clients!
How might we create a platform for the IRP x Sentinels collaboration that can market the exclusive coaching materials and communicate just how rare of a learning opportunity it is, while also providing an accessible means to subscribe?
Discovery & Early Research
Before starting any design work, it was important to gain a deep understanding of the entirety of the problem space, including knowledge in:
Online, PC-based video game marketing
Collaboration product launches
Subscription-based models
Coaching businesses
This collaborative product resides at the intersection of these 4 niches, so performing intentionally-targeted research here provided a much needed foundation to start out with.
After having many in-depth conversations with the IRP team to understand exactly what they were looking for and the niche that the product sits in, I underwent a discovery phase where I conducted competitor analysis, user research, and informal interviews with my gaming community network (as an ex-Blizzard Entertainment employee and avid gamer myself). Here’s what I learned:
Coaching products are investments that needs to provide real value and feel “worth it” to clients
Video games are rarely a client’s priority and not many are willing to pay money to improve
Sentinels is a REALLY BIG name! Their e-sports teams are some of the best world-wide!
Clients want to know EXACTLY what they are buying when they subscribe.
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be transparent and market the actual contents of the product … let the materials and results speak for themselves!
IRP’s clients are niche in nature … you don’t need to create a design that speaks to the masses - focus on your target!
Leverage their name and brand, their status and rankings market themselves.
Provide a concise yet digestible way for clients to compare different tiers and benefits so they can make informed purchases.
First Drafts and Iterations
Early on, the IRP team was very communicative about the structure that they had in mind - which made it easy to get started. Some early requirements that were established were:
Landing page to introduce the collaboration and provide visuals for the coaching content (videos, screenshots, testimonials).
The IRP team wanted a few specific sections:
Landing banner to push the branding and create an early sense of excitement and coolness
Content Preview section to showcase what exactly a client would be purchasing
Testimonial section to provide clients with proof that the product works as marketed
Coach section to showcase the named coaches from Sentinels to highlight their credentials
Subscription/Purchase page to showcase the different product tiers.
The IRP team left this fairly open-ended so I applied my research to try out different design patterns that might resonate with the stakeholders and clients.
Starting with wireframing, it was important to build a structural layout, since they wanted to limit the actual website to the landing page scroll and the subscription pages ONLY. During this stage, I was able to establish a flow for the entirety of the site to help build interest and drive clients to eventually move towards a purchase.
Early iterations experimented with the amount of word content vs. visual content, since a delicate balance needed to be achieved in order to effectively market the coaching content with in-depth detail while not being too word-dense.
There was also a lot of experimentation and iteration with the amount and placement of “purchase” call-to-action (CTA) buttons. Too many made the page feel too pushy and purchase-driven, but too little meant that prospective clients would be confused on how to move forward or not feel motivated enough to purchase.
Landing on a Design & Testing
After many rounds of iteration, including experimentation and user testing, the IRP team felt that we had achieved a serviceable minimum-viable product (MVP) that struck a good balance between word content and visuals, as well as amount of CTA.
At this point, the team felt that the only way to improve was to host a mini-launch of the MVP to a limited audience to learn more about client habits and the overall user experience. So I prepped the design files to discuss further with the developers.
Developer Handoff
With a quick turn around and impending deadline, I felt that it was important to think of the developers throughout the design process. By using consistent design components/tokens and creating non-complex, easy-to-design layouts (such as modals and light boxes), the team could cut down on development time to get the pages launch ready faster.
Throughout the design process, I looped developers into my decision-making process and kept them in-the-know, so that nothing would be a surprise at hand-off. I gave an in-depth walkthrough of the designs and provided guidelines and documentation to ensure that each design decision would be communicated with clarity and the final product matched the concepts that all stakeholders had agreed to.
Projected Impact
The collaboration is projected to launch in the coming months, during the Spring 2026 season, to align with a general trend of increased Valorant playtime.
As the primary client touch point for all things related to the IRP x Sentinels collaboration, this project will be integral to all marketing and sales related to the product. Additionally, the designs created for this project will inform the visual language and marketing assets that will be created for the later marketing campaign, which is slated to include email, social media, and video advertisements.
The creation of these designs provides a template and design precedent moving forward for how IRP can launch other products, and can also be retroactively applied to improve how their current products are being offered. In particular, tier preview modal is a new design pattern that the IRP team liked very much. Its success in being concise, yet extremely informative has proven to be a big hit with clients.