2023 - Present | Senior Product Design Manager | Sony PlayStationOver three years, my team and I have made continuous design improvements to the ageing PlayStation Partners platform. Our work enables new PlayStation game services, fixes platform usability and accessibility issues for game studios, and streamlines and automates internal workflows at Sony.
Background
The specifics of this work remain under NDA.
PlayStation Partners is a web platform used by thousands of game developers (including AAA studios like Rockstar and EA) to publish their games to the PlayStation digital store. It includes tools and documentation for game developers to help them optimise how their game runs on the console, setup trophies and multiplayer services. It includes tools for uploading a finished game for Sony certification and managing PlayStation store pages and content.
However, the platform is ageing, complex and fragmented into multiple, inconsistent tools. It presents a steep learning curve for game developers and publishers and publishing a game at times requires substantial effort of them and of Sony internal staff.
At PlayStation I manage a team of ten designers, delivering 15-20 platform releases each year, which:
• Enable new PlayStation services for game developers such as game streaming and automated player help.
• Fix major usability and accessibility issues for game developers.
• Improve efficiency and automate workflows for Sony internal users, such as technical support and game certification.
Alongside this the team are continuously improving ways of working - for example helping introduce more user research, a design system and usability and accessibility standards.
Work & Outcomes
PlayStation Partners Platform
My team work across multiple product teams and areas of the business, typically improving user experience for a certain area of the platform, whilst co’ordinating efforts to ensure user flows make sense holistically and design is standardised and consistent.
Our work features user research (done in close collaboration with our user research teams), requirements definition together with product managers, service design and - because of the complex, technical nature of the tools - auditing current systems to enable discussion of technical changes with Engineering colleagues.
Outcomes of our work include:
• Increase in user NPS and survey scores relating to platform year-on-year
• Reduction in user effort and cognitive load to build and publish games to PlayStation
• Reduction in technical support team workload and increase in users’ able to self-serve on platform. For example in finding documentation and managing their teams’ accounts.
• Successfully adapting platform to cater for changing expectations in gaming - for example, reducing effort to add content updates to live service games