Summary

Blizzard players never had a simple way to send digital gifts to their friends, redeem their own gifts and manage any unclaimed products or gifts. Players receiving gifts would have to manually enter product codes into their account from an email and have no way to manage how and when products were applied. We observed through previous usability studies that players giving gifts didn’t know the emails of their gaming friends and would drop off during the gifting process as a result.

As the principal Product Designer on the project, I was instrumental in designing tactical features to improve the current gifting experience and crafting a medium/long term UX strategy to integrate gifting within the Blizzard experience in general.

Goals

• Provide a simple way to gift to friends and non-friends in Blizzard web store, app and in-game.
• Allow players to quickly manage products they’ve sent and received in their account.
• Increase gifting purchases across all platforms.
• Reduce fraud.

Contribution

As the principal Product Designer:

• Created the medium/long term UX strategy to ensure the best experience for players.
• Contributed to the UX research strategy.
• Conducted the UX discovery phase (gifting data analysis, stakeholder interviews, competitive analysis).
• Collaborated and coordinated with 6 teams.
• Designed user flows, wireframes and prototypes.

Discovery

Based on the insights that we had from previous user studies and existing engineering issues, I started the discovery phase by involving our UX research department. We conducted a competitive analysis and ran brainstorms with PMs and engineers.

From all the ideas collected, we created scenarios and ran a concept study to see which ideas resonated the most with our players. The goal was to identify areas of improvements and new opportunities related to gifting.

Scenarios & Concepts

Scenario example: It’s Abe’s birthday and Kaya receives a notification in their group chat. Kaya clicks on the notification and see gift recommendations for Abe. She select an emoji packs and continues to checkout. Abe’s receive a notification on his phone, claim his gift and uses it the next time he logs in to the game.

Design

Following the concept study, we eliminated features that didn’t resonate with players and narrowed down the scope to a set of tactical features that would be delivered before the holiday season. Those features would alleviate the most common pain points found in the discovery phase and previous usability studies.

• Friend-to-friend gifting:
  • Users could now gift directly to Blizzard friends without the use of email removing friction during the checkout flow.
• Keyless gifting:
  • Blizzard built a system that would allow players to send digital gifts directly without the use of keys and emails.
  • Recipients no longer had to manually enter a key in their account to redeem their gift.
• Created a destination in the Blizzard App where players can manage their received gifts.

Results

Changes had an overall positive impact on gifting.

• Volume of gifts sent doubled.
• Keyless gift system helped reduced fraud significantly.
• New gifting features allowed more products to be giftable in Blizzard’s digital store.