IGN
Bringing a systems approach to the leader in games and entertainment
Where many many have gone before
IGN has a unique culmination of challenges. It has more than 20 years of content that need to be managed and available to it's more than 150 million audience members anywhere, anytime.
I bring a product design mentality and methodology to designing for this media company, that primarily manifests in developing, maintaining, and enforcing a new design system that is being implemented with our team of developers page by page, along with infrastructure updates, and deep dives into internal tools and content management systems to improve quality of life for editors, and customers.
One of my favorite challenges working at IGN was balancing mentorship, systems, research, experience, interface, branding, and prototyping in HTML and CSS. But when I came to IGN there was one central problem to tackle, the lack of a cohesive design system to follow for developing and updating it’s suite of products.
The design system I built and maintained was a push into a more modern, and responsive approach that let the editorial content shine. The system was supported by a color pallet inspired by the areas surround the headquarters in San Francisco.
The IGN Homepage
Role — UX + UI lead.
This project was a particular challenge, as it meant balancing the needs of stakeholders in every area of IGN’s business. Fielding requests from sales for ad placements and new monetizable opportunities, commerce for prominent affiliate placements, editorial to have more opportunities for curation, engineering to limit scope.
The launch was fairly controversial, and I wanted to change the team’s customer communication strategy, so I put myself out there as a name and face to the redesign on IGN, and Reddit. Comments ranged from supportive to inflammatory, but by most measures, the new homepage handily beat our previous page for every stakeholder group and statistic that mattered to the company.
IGN Shorts
Role — UX + UI lead
IGN shorts was a project designed to bring IGN Social content from Snapchat and Instagram to IGN's owned and operated property, where views were inherently worth more.