Riot Account Management 2.0
Legacy systems can become overly expensive to maintain and complicate creating new, best in class user features. To bring align the needs of Riot's players and business goals, I used deep research and insights for a scalable path forward for a format simultaneously improving the user experience and operation costs.
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Problem Statement
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Scope vs Value
How to get the most value now, and what needs to be delayed?
This was a complicated project which required lots of organization and understanding what I could do without breaking live features or bloating scope.
Focusing on structural changes to improve scalability was a result of stakeholder alignment.
I mapped out functionality to understand how everything worked, where the challenges would come from, and how far things could be pushed now.
Through conversations I was able to drive additional regional alignment, bringing one unique stakeholder into the conversation, to reduce future engineering and design debt.
Weighing value-to-friction, a big UI overhaul was deemed out of scope for initial work.
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Solutions Via Research
A redesign to reflect market expectations and our users.
Market Research
To get a broad but targeted understanding that covered enough expectations, I did a full breakdown of specific competition to properly craft solutions for OUR users.
Google
XBox/Microsoft
Playstation
Discord
Battlenet
User Research
Alongside a researcher, also crafted a survey for our players to understand their goals and expectations.
The data was sent out and analyzed, with results fairly clear and provided data points to make decisions.
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Mobile Usability
What isn't working, and what needs improving?
Looking at the current experience a few things were clear, and outlining those allowed targeted fixes.
Menu dropdown caused usability issues. The design would need to be overhauled to reflect the IA changes. UI shifting when the menu states change, created user confusion.
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Final Outcomes
What was the result?
There were incredible challenges to fully complete this project due to roadmap considerations, and the considerable engineering effort and cross team alignment required to deconstruct then rebuild the entire system. So any metrics currently lie in the data that drove the decisions.
Having already launched the internal developer system MVP focused on creating wide system scalability, I had unique insights into the value of tackling this redesign.
It's clear that once released this will be a mutually beneficial outcome to both player experiences and the company bottom line. Not only with usability and reduced API costs, but handling those will unlock the companies abilities to more efficiently build experiences that increase player value.
It also highlights the longer companies put off making their systems efficient and scalable, the more challenging and expensive that work becomes.
