The Battle.net Desktop App connects Blizzard players with their games, with each other and with the world of Blizzard.
Overview
The Desktop App was redesigned and launched into Open Beta in Q4 2019. I led a team of UX & UI designers, Researchers and Data Analysts in the redesign project, from initial concept to the live product. We followed a strict UCD proccess, with thorough qualititive and quantitive research, iterative design sprints, user testing and prototyping. Alsongside the redesign we built a new Battle.net Design System, styleguide and visual design language. This project is still in progress, and we continue to iterate and improve as we gather feedback and data.
Year: 2019-2020
Platform: PC & MAC Desktop
Role: UX/UI Lead, Design Group Manager
Design Team: 2x UI Designers 5x UX Designers 2x Researchers 1x Data Analyst
Problem
The Battle.net Desktop app has three main goals; to connect players with their games, to each other, and to the world of Blizzard. It was launched in 2013, and has incrementally evolved during that time, but remained largely unchanged in structure. As Blizzard & Activision's game library expanded, the complexity and business requirements of the app increased. We needed to improve the flexibility and scalability of the application, whilst adjusting focus to better meet users' changing behaviors.We had the support of telemetry and longitudinal research that identified key oppourtunity areas that we could make improvements in while addressing these issues.
Process
We knew a redesign would be a large project, too complex to operate in our normal agile structure. We followed an extended UCD process, taking our time to cover discovery thoroughly to inform our project goals and strategy. During early ideation and iteration we ran weekly design sprints, prototyping in Principle and Axure and running user testing at the end of each week, to validate, iterate and inform the direction of the next sprint.We launched an early open beta in Q4 2019, and are monitoring telemetry and feedback in order to help understand how we can evolve the product further, as we continue to ship additional features.
