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 this functionality was estimated to be upwards of a year's worth of work. As a result, leadership often bypassed usability improvements like these in deference to projects with short term revenue gains.
I led an initiative across two design teams to outline the major issues with navigation across our ecosystem and to develop a recommended path forward. The goal was to communicate the importance of this work to justify its engineering cost and demystify the interconnectedness of the pieces.
Yep, it's a confluence doc. Yep, I hate it too.
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
The work was shared cross-discipline first to get buy in from our product and engineering counterparts and then presented to leadership. As of winter 2026, this project is underway! Design is complete and is awaiting grooming, leadership approval, and development bandwidth.