The challenge
Launcher experiences need to make many states feel obvious: friends, invites, groups, activity, empty lists, and account interactions all have to work without making the product feel heavy.
Bethesda
Game Launcher Platform
A platform experience for players and teams that brought friend management, group creation, activity states, and launcher interactions into a more coherent product flow.
The approach
I mapped the social model into clear screens, stateful components, and focused modals so players could understand what was happening and act quickly.
The impact
The redesign improved the story around player relationships and gave product and engineering a cleaner model for building and validating complex social states.
Process
Making game-platform UX feel lighter.
The design language had to support dark product surfaces, high-density controls, and fast player actions.
Model the social system
Defined friend, group, invitation, and activity states so the experience had a shared product grammar.
Design state coverage
Created interface states for empty moments, menus, selected results, group lists, and modal transitions.
Prototype interactions
Used prototypes to help teams see how player actions moved through the launcher instead of reviewing static screens.
Align delivery
Partnered with product and engineering on behavior details before implementation decisions became expensive.
Artifacts
Launcher flows and social states.
Activity menu
A stateful action surface for player and group interactions.
Group states
Exploration across invite, active, inactive, and management states.
Add friend modal
A focused workflow for searching, confirming, and acting on player results.
Create group
Simple progressive disclosure for a player task that could otherwise become noisy.
Friend list
Dark UI patterns tuned for scanning status and taking quick action.
Prototype motion
A prototype view for validating transitions, flow comprehension, and pacing.