My Roles // Design Lead, Confluence Author, Wireframer, Politician
As identified in the Desktop App Scaling Strategy, Battle.net evolved from a small, bespoke application serving a few key franchises to a larger platform with a growing catalog. Over time, this growth put strain on many parts of the user experience. The ecosystem navigation, in particular, suffered from a lot of duplication, confusion, and dead ends.
The engineering effort needed to make improvements in this area was large and involved several teams working together across several roadmaps. For example, as you'll see below, there are several dead ends in the app that would benefit from the addition of a back button. Due to a technical hurdle, adding back functionality was estimated to be upwards of a year's worth of work. You read that right. As a result, leadership often bypassed usability improvements like these in deference to projects with short term revenue gains.
I led an initiative to outline the major issues with navigation across our entire ecosystem and develop a recommended path forward. The goal was to communicate the importance of this work to justify the engineering cost and demystify the interconnectedness of the pieces.
Yep, it's a confluence doc. Yep, I hate it too. But it worked. Know your audience, friends.
Something Splashier
To further illustrate this concept, we had our principal designer build and record an end-to-end user journey prototype. For visual folks, this helped bridge the gap between the strategy above and their understanding of our current system. See some screenshots from the recording below.
Removing unowned games from a player's library. Peep the back button!
Concept for future Library engagement feature.
Shop "Browse All" replaces unowned games in Library.
Outcome
As of winter 2026, this project is underway! Design is complete and is awaiting cross-team alignment, leadership approval, and development bandwidth.