Bridging New and Legacy Connectivity for Gamers

Xbox.com

During the lead up to the Xbox One’s November 2013 launch, strategic changes were made to Xbox.com. Social, one of the most visited sections of the site, was not slated to be updated. My team recognized that a core problem with leaving this section unchanged was the Xbox One’s new follower/following friends model differs significantly from the legacy reciprocal friendship model used for the original Xbox and Xbox 360.

Key goals were to reconcile the two friendship models, be transparent about the changes, make a modern, elegant social landing, reduce the redundancies in the old social pages and to incorporate new Xbox One features, like game clips, new gamerpics, and improved achievements.

Overall, the site hits those marks. The new profile page serves as a celebration of the gamer, featuring game clips and recent achievements. The friends section allows the user to easily add, remove, and favorite users. We made the decision that after the user performs any Xbox One social action (either following a friend on Xbox One, or adding a favorite), the site would see them as an Xbox One user. Going forward they would follow and be followed, not send requests. They can still respond to legacy friend requests, but for them the website would transition from legacy to modern.

Not all features made the tight timeline, and I faced numerous challenges. I traveled to China to engage directly with our developers, dealt with a rotating cast of visual designers, and had to convince my lead of the project's value after a design team re-org.

In the brief time between the Xbox One launch and the site launch, it became a highly requested feature, and was met quite positively on launch.