Gaming platform
Role
Design Manager
Contributions
Product Design
Duration
2023 — 2024
Employer
Yahoo
Overview
Yahoo Games was one of those internet things that had been around forever. If you grew up with the internet in the early 2000s, you probably remember playing checkers or word games on it — maybe at school when the teacher wasn’t looking. But over the years? It kinda faded into the background. The design hadn’t aged well. It didn’t work great on phones. And honestly, most people didn’t even know it still existed.
I led the design side of a full rebuild, working closely with execs, engineers, and product folks. We weren’t just slapping on a new coat of paint. We wanted to rethink what Yahoo Games could be, something modern, simple, and actually fun to use again.
Game Category Page
Challenge
Here’s the thing: the site wasn’t totally broken, but it felt broken. The layout was cluttered. The navigation didn’t make sense. Game discovery was, well, kind of a mess. And on mobile? Forget about it.
Users weren’t staying. They’d land on the homepage, click around a bit, then leave. Some of the games were solid, but the whole experience made it hard to care. Plus, behind the scenes, there were all these little design inconsistencies from years of updates. It was like trying to patch a jacket that had already been patched five times.
And honestly? There wasn’t a clear plan for where the product was going. It was just floating — kept alive by habit more than intention.
Solution
So we got to work. We started by talking to people — users, teams, anyone who touched the product. We ran audits, looked at what other casual game platforms were doing, and mapped out what users actually wanted to do when they showed up.
Then we rebuilt the whole experience. We simplified everything. A cleaner layout. Easier navigation. Games were front and center, not buried three clicks deep. We added room for trending titles and suggestions based on what people liked. Basically, we wanted the site to feel like a fun, low-pressure place to kill a few minutes — like it used to, but updated for now.
We also built a flexible component system so teams could actually scale the content without breaking the layout every time. And yeah, we tested a lot. Sometimes what we thought made sense totally didn’t, so we adjusted.
Was it perfect? No. But it was a massive step forward. And honestly, it felt like Yahoo Games finally had its act together again.
Game Category Page
Impact
After the redesign, users started staying longer. Game sessions went up. Mobile traffic actually meant something now. Bounce rates dropped. And the internal teams — the ones managing the content day-to-day — told us it was way easier to work with. No more duct-tape fixes or fighting the layout to make things fit.
Most importantly, Yahoo Games stopped feeling like something stuck in the past. It started feeling like a real product again — something with potential, with energy, with an actual future.