World of Warcraft Support Portal
My Role
Visual Design, User Testing, Icon Design, Animation, Prototyping, Development
Objective
This in-game interface was designed to assist World of Warcraft players in solving their issues to quickly return them to their gameplay. A ground-up overhaul was required to bring the interface to modern design standards.
The World of Warcraft Support site offers useful resources such as knowledge-base articles and self service solutions with regards to account, technical, and gameplay related issues. These methods are designed to allow customers to self serve themselves. Should these solutions not help, escalating the issue to a customer service representative should be simple and straight forward.
This redesign coincided with an of an influx of players from the release of the “Shadowlands” expansion. This launch became the fastest-selling PC game of all time, with 3.7 million sales in a single day.
Style Tiles
The previous rendition of the World of Warcraft Support portal did not adhere closely to the game’s brand guidelines. It previously had the look and feel of an agnostic Blizzard site that caters to all Blizzard game titles.
Instead, this interface should integrate more closely with the surrounding game interfaces. To address this, the first exercise was to create style tiles to illustrate various design directions we could apply to the whole experience.
Component Libraries
The next step was to start building component libraries and style guides for other designers and developers to use as patterns. This ensures consistency across the site which is critical.
Prototyping and Animation
Next, these UI components were applied to low fidelity flows created in collaboration with UX designers to transition them into high fidelity mockups.
Micro interactions and animations were then created between screens to build out a working prototype. This helps illustrate the design flow to various stakeholders.
Design Specs
In order to reach the level of fidelity the design team was seeking on the final product, detailed design specs were provided to the engineering team.
Reporting
Looking at the transformation to the newly redesigned game experience, several key goals were reached. Reports show an increased success rate for customer self-services and has resulted in less company contacts. This resulted in drastic company cost savings.
Prototype
Being able to showcase screen to screen flows and convey desired microinteractions and animations is helpful for developers to understand implentation.
Next Steps
There are more ongoing initiatives for the website today. This includes designing improved recommendation systems with machine learning algorithms and updating component libraries on the design to code environment to assist developers. There is also a growing effort into making the site compliant with regards to accessibility and catering to those that require assistive devices.