Valorant: Role Swap

Designing a new feature on the Valorant to enhance players experience. Players choose their primary and secondary roles before the match, ensuring that the team has a designated spot for each core role.

Year:

2025

Company:

Gaming

Contribution:

Product Designer

Project Duration:

4 weeks

OVERVIEW :

Within Valorant, players currently enter matches without any structured system for selecting preferred roles (such as Duelist, Controller, Initiator, or Sentinel).This often leads to role conflicts, uneven team compositions, and frustration during agent select. Unlike games like Dota 2 or League of Legends, where players can declare primary and secondary role preferences before a match, Valorant current lacks a similar mechanism.

Objective :

To determine the critical points of users trying to progress within the current Valorant landscape, I conducted secondary and primary research to understand if this feature would be a benefit to players:

WHAT DID USERS THINK?

I conducted secondary research and asked players about the overall Valorant competitive landscape. From this research, there was a high need for a role-determining feature that allowed players to 'declare' their role before entering the agent-selection stage. This would allow players to clearly understand which roles were needed for the team to be successful before playing a high-intense match. From the research, although this feature was considered a necessity for competitive players to receive a proper a planned out team, it was also necessary to understand that this was more of a suggestion for players instead of a requirement that players had to play the role that they were selected to play.

Design and Ideation :

Similar to Valorant, Dota 2 and League of Legends is a team based competitive 5 versus 5 game that needs everyone's support and contribution to complete the overall objective and to win the game.

Findings :

When games such as League of Legends or Dota 2 introduced the idea of "role swapping" it served as a strategic maneuver to allow teams to adapt to any unfavorable matchups or leverage hero versatility. The ability to play different positions, is a key reason why introducing this feature is so effective, plus it allows players who may be stuck in one role to play a variety of different roles and introduce new play styles.

defining the problem :

Valorant is not like Dota 2 or League of Legends, so it would need to have some type of value that would be relative to players. Players need to be able to understand why the Valorant team would want to introduce this feature and how it would positively impact competitive players in the future. This is why I developed key personas to help showcase players reasonings for these changes:

Sketches :

After the players desire for this feature was clear, I developed low-fidelity prototypes that I would test on users to see which interface they resonated the most with.

Ideate :

Please view the prototype from Menma's point of view. This prototype shows the initiation of the trade.

View Prototype Here

Please view the prototype from Menma's point of view. This prototype shows the initiation of the trade.

Validation :

Once my high fidelity prototypes were complete, it was time to test them out. I asked the same users about the feature and gathered the following feedback:

Players believed that the trading feature would be extremely beneficial in understanding team compositions and allowing players to understand their given role rather than expecting every game to have the composition that they want
The use of the recommended agent is favorable to users to understand which agents they're better at playing at in certain maps — it eliminates the need to figure out which agent would be best for them without 3rd party tools
Depending on the players mood at certain times, flexing roles or agents will be a challenge especially if they were previously on a loss streak
Additional Features: Including a recommended agent to players for specific maps and roles based on the players history, KD/A and overall performance

Wrap up :

The need for this feature was probably born from personal frustration but I genuinely feel that players need this feature to make Valorant's competitive environment a positive experience. Valorant's evolving meta demands for adaptive solutions and as new agents continuously reshape team compositions and strategic possibilities, I recognized that there's an opportunity to allow players to have some type of additional control through intentional role selection.

This feature addresses an ongoing pain point: chaotic agent selection process that often leads to unbalanced teams (Such as the notorious five-duelist team composition that we all love) and disappointed players that are unable to play their preferred roles. By building the role-selection feature into the queue system, players gain a sense of control over their competitive experience that balance individual players preferences with team-based gameplay requirements.