Project Title

Esports Admin Tool

Project Detail

Watchtower is the product name of a Blizzard Esports administrative tool. It was first developed in 2016 to support the management of Blizzard Esports events. The tool tracks and records important Esports data such as tournament results, bracket information, professional player profiles, and match details. The collected data can be accessed via APIs and shared with both internal sites and external third parties.

My Role

I am responsible for making updates to the features of Watchtower to improve the experience for stakeholders and to enhance the usability of the tools for more efficient functionality and easier usage.

Problems and Insights

Exposed to human error

The current administrative tool for Blizzard Esports has a poor user experience. Given that it handles live Esports APIs, any human error can lead to major issues. Observing the admins using the tool was nerve-wracking, as it felt like walking on thin ice. Fortunately, all the Blizzard Esports managers were experts and rarely made mistakes. However, the thought of what would happen if they suddenly quit Blizzard is concerning.

Poor tool structure

Watchtower was only 2 years old when it was only used to support the Overwatch League and a few other gaming tournaments. As Blizzard expanded its Esports business in 2017 and 2018, the team received many requests from other gaming teams to support their tournaments. However, the tool was not equipped to handle the organization of multiple Esports tournaments at the same time, which led to an increased risk of human error problems.

Unintuitive ui components

Watchtower required improvements to its user interface design for better usability. Many of the tasks performed by Esports Admins were repetitive, and the current UI components were limited in their ability to support these tasks. The unintuitive design was a significant hindrance for the Admins in their repetitive work.

Additionally, the Battle.net organization was eager to harmonize its design system with all other Battle.net tools. The Watchtower project presented a perfect opportunity to test the new Battle.net Design System.

The tournaments separated into Game franchise and Esports titles

Same Esports title in different years are organized into different series

General information page about an Esports series

Match progress and rankings

Bracket look of a tournament overview

Final Thoughts

Unfortunately, Blizzard decided to shut down most of its Esports business in 2019. Even the surviving operations will be managed by external third parties. The last 9 months of work were focused on upgrading the tool to be self-sustainable, so that Blizzard could save resources and reduce efforts to improve the usability of Watchtower. There were still many design improvements to be made, but they could not be carried out any further.

As a young designer, it was an interesting experience to see how the future of a project can change so easily based on the company's status and leadership decisions.

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© 2025 Felix Junghwan Choi; All rights reserved.