Blizzard
In-Game Checkout
Summary
As the principal Product Designer on this project, I collaborated with over 5 engineering and game teams in order to unify the individual payment systems into one consistent experience. I wanted to streamline the in-game checkout experience across all the games, without compromising the existing trust or game experience of our players.
Goals
- Provide an accessible, consistent and trustworthy in-game checkout experience across all games globally.
- Reduce engineering maintenance overhead.
- Keep players in-game when saving a new payment method or using 3rd party payment methods so they spend less time purchasing products and more time enjoying their gaming experience.
Contribution
As the principal Product Designer:
- Defined UX strategy to ensure the best experience for players.
- Conducted the UX discovery phase (checkout data analysis, stakeholder interviews, competitive analysis).
- Collaborated and coordinated with 3 different engineering teams within Blizzard, multiple game teams, QA, risk, legal and customer support.
- Designed user flows, wireframes and prototypes.
- Helped design usability studies.
- Remained the main point of contact for the initiative throughout the implementation in January 2016 to this day.
Discovery
- Assessed the functional and visual differences between the games and Blizzard web store checkout experience.
- Analyzed the data across in-game and Blizzard web store.
- Interviewed Blizzard’s Customer Support to understand player issues related to checkout.
- Conducted a competitive analysis for in-game and web checkout experiences.
Findings
I presented the main discovery findings to the various stakeholders involved in the project.
- Players could not find their favorite payment methods in-game.
In-Game payment systems supported only 2 payment methods while the Blizzard web store supports over 30 payment methods globally. - Players were confused about the amount totals of their transactions because in-game payment systems did not support tax breakdowns.
- The payment page didn’t clearly communicate why the prices in the in-game store and at checkout were different.
- In-game payment systems didn’t provide context for payment errors.
- Most competitors had the same checkout experience and UI across their web and in-game stores.
In-Game VS Blizzard Digital Store Payment Screens UI
Design
I proposed to leverage Blizzard’s web store features to answer users’ needs and solve technical issues.
- Provide additional payment methods in-game and improve accessibility.
- Create a consistent checkout experience across the Blizzard web store, desktop app and in-game.
- Provide a consistent UI across all games.
- Clearly and consistently display tax information when applicable.
- Provide transaction status clarity.
Challenges
After seeing the design recommendations, most game teams were opposed to using a consistent UI. They felt that including Blizzard’s generic UI in-game would confuse players and potentially cause drop-off during purchase. I partnered with a UI designer to create design options to test how users would respond to a fully custom, a hybrid and a generic platform UI.
UI variations
Validation
- Players preferred the consistent Blizzard UI over the custom game UI.
- The Blizzard blue instilled trust and players felt the interface was less crowded.
- Some players felt that having a consistent checkout experience on Blizzard web store, desktop app and the games made the payment more ‘’real’’. They compared making micro transactions with in-game currency to making purchases with real payment methods.
- Players thought the new checkout experience was “Simple, fast and straightforward”.
Prototype Example
Initial User Flows
Results
We observed the following impact after the launch of the project.
- In-Game conversion rate surpassed Blizzard web store conversion rate by 10%.
- Users were purchasing 25% more in-game than on the web.
- Sales in countries using mostly 3rd party payment methods increased significantly.