Project Details Dashboard - Blizzard's Crediting System

Table of Contents

CONTEXT

What are credits?

Employees find excitement and reward in seeing their hard work acknowledged.

Crediting everyone reflects Blizzard's core value that "Every Voice Matters." When proper credit isn’t given, it can be disheartening for contributors whose work goes unrecognized.

Being omitted from credits can hinder contributors from showcasing their work to potential employers or collaborators, as credits serve as a key way to validate their contributions.‍

THE PROBLEM

But the legacy crediting tool made the process painstakingly arduous and failed to evolve as Blizzard expanded.

Built in the early 2000s, Blizzard's crediting tool wasn’t designed for managing multiple games or expansions at a time. Its limitations forced admins to use Excel, as the tool’s UI is too cumbersome for handling 10,000+ names.

Creating credits for 1-2 games currently takes over 3 months, delaying release planning.

1. complicated site navigation, and information overload made it hard to find important information.
2. made it difficult to manage people and complicated collaboration.
3. led to more manual actions from admins who have migrated the process to Excel sheets.

Creating a credits report for a game should be a smooth process.

How can we improve this manually intensive credits creation process?

Goals for the redesign

DEFINING THE PROBLEM SPACE

Understanding our users

I aimed to understand how administrators interacted with the product, collaborated with each other, and where their frustrations originated.

Methodology

6+ individual 30-minute Zoom interviews with different categories of administrators: Head QA admins, game team admins, and department admins.

Research questions:

1. "Please help me better understand your process and workflow when working on a credits report."
2. "How often are you working solo compared to collaborating with others?"
3. "What drives you away from using this site?"

Where can we make the biggest impact?

A closer look into "Clear Report Status"

I focused on improving the experience of understanding the report's status.

The existing tool had inaccurate progress bars and no clear way to track remaining tasks. Administrators had to click through multiple pages to get the necessary information.

How can I paint an accurate picture of the status to help administrators work more efficiently?

DESIGN IDEATION

Competitive analysis and learning from other teams

My research showed that a widget dashboard is the most common and effective way to display multiple types of information and track changes over time.
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In a conversation with a project manager from SupportDesk, Blizzard's support request tool, I learned how they used tables, progress circles, progress bars, and charts to serve specific purposes.

A project details dashboard per project will increase overall transparency of each projects' process and track important metrics at-a-glance.

Wireframing

I designed early wireframes to present the concept to team members and stakeholders for feedback.

I worked closely with stakeholders for the duration of this project, so I was able to quickly iterate on designs.

Dashboard Widget Iteration

Stakeholder involvement throughout the project allowed for fast widget design iteration and testing.

Prior Widget Iterations

Assignment Progress

Research uncovered how administrators manage creditees in individual sections, such as Leadership, Design, Engineering, Art, etc. With tens of thousands of creditees to monitor, it can quickly become overwhelming.

I designed an expandable widget with individual progress indicators to make it easy to track the completion level of each section, showing the necessary data without cluttering the page.
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User testing uncovered:

1. Admin work patterns valued depth in detail.
2. Progress bars was the right visualization to display completion over time while also providing a minimalistic visual.

Final Widget Iteration

Prior Widget Iterations

Creditee Counter

With so many employees, it's challenging to track if anyone is missing or misplaced. This widget displays a headcount of credited individuals to track completion. I wanted an easy way to compare and contrast at a glance.

User testing uncovered:

1. Admins know the exact number coming from each team, so in-depth numbers can serve as a method for double-checking.
2. Many colors did more harm than good. Admins voiced feeling overwhelmed.

Final Widget Iteration

UX Writing: "Lost Souls" vs. "Unassigned"
We initially used 'Lost Souls,' inspired by World of Warcraft, for the unassigned. While fun, I changed it to 'Unassigned' for clarity.

Not all admins are familiar with game terms, so I opted for more straightforward labels: 'Assigned' and 'Unassigned.'

REFINE

Credits: Before and After

The previous credits platform had:

1. A single progress bar to track the entire project's progress with no additional details
2. Inaccurately tracked data
3. Many pages to navigate through before landing where you needed to be

After!

Adding a project details dashboard increases transparency for each project and provides direct links to navigate to project pages.
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Click image to enlarge.

IMPACT

Impact

This project was launched after my time at Blizzard, but updates from my peers show the response from veteran administrators was positive.

Streamlined Credits

By simplifying the site and reducing the effort to create credits, they can now be completed faster, allowing admins to manage multiple at once. Previously, the process was so time-intensive that stakeholders could only handle one or two credits over months.

Better Communication

Improved site organization reduces lost clickthroughs, boosts clarity, and enhances communication between administrators and those involved with credits, making approvals and edits faster.

FINAL REMARKS

The ongoing development of a more streamlined crediting platform is a representation of Blizzard's commitment that every voice matters.

Personally, this was a project that was filled of growth for myself as a designer. I joined this project in the middle of the discovery phase that was led by a separate designer, and catching up in understanding for such a complicated platform was challenging, yet made the process of becoming of a domain leader very rewarding.

Meeting with stakeholders consistently throughout the project and receiving positive feedback made me optimistic that we're making a big difference in a tool they use often. I am grateful for the opportunity to have been a part of this project.