As a Senior Manager of Product Design at Blizzard Entertainment, I assembled and managed a fantastic team of user experience and visual designers that designed engaging experiences to support Activision, Blizzard and King operations worldwide.
Company Brief
- Blizzard fosters creativity and encourages innovation from its 5,000+ employees
- Premier developer and publisher of entertainment software
- Iconic game franchises played and enjoyed by millions of players around the world
- Players gather on Battle.net to connect, purchase games and engage in multiplayer experience
Product Design
Responsible for over 10 Product Experiences
- Asset management system, interactive lobby experiences, building and seat locator, game credits management system, internal communications portal, global support and HR portals
- Partnering with 4 teams: Custom Development, Application Services, Platform Products and Project Management
- Servicing 3 game studios: Activision, Blizzard Entertainment and King
Notable Design Challenges
- Systemizing product design workflow
- Establishing foundational KPIs and OKRs
- Solidifying unified experience, look, and feel for various products
- Technical and Design Debt of 40+ products (over a decade old)
Design Operations
Accomplishments
- Established 2 base design systems
- Developed Product and Team Reporting Framework
- Developed Product Design Career Program
- Centralized User Research
- Introduced and implemented usage of new Design Tools
Results
- Enhanced usability and information architecture
- Insight and elevation of Net Promoter Score and System Usability Score
- Increased morale and retention of team members
- Improvement in collaboration between departments and stakeholders
- Increased capacity in UX research activities
Product Highlight: Keyring
Keyring is an Asset Management System. We are both players and developers of our own game products – this platform provides an efficient and central solution to manage and distribute game keys to employees.
Accomplishments
- Completely replaced the legacy Keyring asset management system within the set project time frame
- Adopted by other game studios (Activision)
- Implemented a new scalable design system to be used on future products
Results
- 4.8 System Usability Score (SUS) out of 5
- Product support requests decreased by 70%
- Distribution of game keys set up within minutes vs days prior
Design Standards & Quality Control
Documentation System
- Brand guidelines
- Brand portal
- Base (Mosaic) Design System
Accomplishments
- Collaborated with senior leadership and our marketing creative team to establish brand guidelines aligned with our culture and mission
- Led vision of our brand portal utilizing Orangelogic’s DAM to host digital assets, style guides, and other relevant documentation
- Defined design principles used by our design team in product development
- Guided creation of a scalable design system, including accessibility guidelines, design patterns, UI component library, along with supporting documentation
- Established workflows to ensure communications, collaboration, and efficiency between designers, engineers, and project managers