Overview

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands is the 9th expansion for the massively popular World of Warcraft MMORPG. The announcement website was launched during BlizzCon and provides fans a first glimpse into the Shadowlands, the afterlife for all mortal souls in Warcraft lore.

PROJECT GOAL

Introduce previously unexplored lore to long time WoW fans

MY CONTRIBUTION

I worked closely with another designer for six months to propose the site strategy, create the wireframes, iterate on the style guide components, and refine the layout. I also proposed a number of motion explorations and worked closely with engineering to help realize some of these concepts.

A Closer Look at the Visual Style

It was a challenge to distill varying afterlife themes into a cohesive visual style guide. We iterated on the look and feel until we found the correct balance of gold, steel, damascus steel, and anima (blue soulstuff).

WoW Shadowlands Visual Style Guide & Components

Design Process

Broaching the Unfamiliar

The Shadowlands expansion takes players into a never explored aspect of Warcraft lore - the afterlife. With the expansion’s foreign setting, we had to be mindful of how we introduced new terminology on the page.

We realized the navigation was an area of the site that could confuse new users. The navigation is the first element a user would encounter on the page and it immediately presented the unfamiliar term, "covenants". A new user encountering the term might feel confused and jump to their own conclusions on what the term might mean.

Original Navigation

Original Site Navigation which Included Covenants as a Top Level Element

We went back to the drawing board with the navigation and came up with a more contextualized design. We grouped the page into two categories: world and features. Within features, we listed out our subpages and also added helpful descriptions for some of the new features. Our goal with the new design was to ensure that at the very least, users would know that a covenant is a major feature of the expansion and that it has subpages that go into a deeper dive.

Final Navigation

Client

Blizzard Entertainment

Role

UX Design; Visual Design; Interaction Design

Design Team

Katherine Joplin; Jason Campbell

Tools

Photoshop; Illustrator; After Effects