Battlefield 6:
Frontend Play Menu
With the latest installment of the Battlefield franchise, the product expanded to its most ambitious scope to date, encompassing its core game modes, a single-player campaign, community-generated content, and new free-to-play experiences. I was responsible for defining the UX strategy for the play menu, transforming it from a simple entry point into a scalable system that helps players quickly understand and access a highly diverse set of experiences.
My Role &
Design Process:
As the UX feature owner, I was responsible for the end-to-end design effort from pre-production through launch and into live service, continuously evolving the experience in response to player feedback and product needs. This work spans strategy, execution, and post-launch optimization, following an iterative process:
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Goal definition and stakeholder alignment
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Competitive analysis
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Wireframing and prototyping
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User testing and iterative refinement
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Close collaboration with UI and tech through implementation
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Post-launch evaluation of player feedback and performance
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Ongoing design strategy and planning to support live service updates
Stakeholder Alignment
Early in the project, it was critical to define clear goals for the new play menu experience. With multiple leaders representing different areas of the menu, I needed to ensure every perspective was considered while still aligning with the overall product objectives. To achieve this, I designed and facilitated a stakeholder alignment workshop to surface key concerns, identify shared priorities, and generate potential solutions. The insights gathered from this session directly informed the research phase and shaped the design direction moving forward.
Research Insights
During the research phase, I analyzed both direct competitors such as Call of Duty, Fortnite, and Halo: Infinite as well as other platforms facing a similar challenge. The question on my mind was "How might we organize diverse types of content in a single interface?"
This exploration also led me to study indirect competitors, including Spotify and Netflix, to understand how successful products structure large, varied content libraries while maintaining clarity and discoverability.
Design Strategy
Using the insights from research as well as the aligned goals from stakeholders the design strategy was born.
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Our stakeholders from product wanted flexibility. Their goals were contingent upon the ability to build a segmented menu to try to promote new content as well as an aggressive upsell strategy to convert a Free-to-play player into a premium owner.
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Game design wanted clear differentiation between the various mode offerings and the ability to get a player into a game as soon as possible.
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On top of this, we wanted the menu to feel familiar to the player which led us to use some of the core tent-poles from the Battlefield 2042 menu like tiles and left-list oriented categories to jump through.
The Design
Our design attempted to meet all the requirements utilizing a familiar interface framework: data-driven recommendations. We wanted the first section the player encountered to give them a high-level look at what others were finding fun and exciting or even let them know what their friends were playing.
Additionally, with the flexibility requested from Product we needed our menu to be able to handle a variety of changing content as well as quickly informing the player about what was available to play. We created a modular system and a tag system which would be able to handle these requirements and still feel familiar to the player as they followed similar interaction patterns as our competitors.
Production Challenges & Post-launch Reception
During the course of production we experienced multiple challenges that impacted the development of the frontend menu. As a result one of the key features we had created, data driven recommendations, had to be postponed for a post-launch quality of life update.
With many design challenges on our plates for launch, the game operations team took on the responsibility of organizing the content in the menu utilizing our flexible design system.
The post-launch reception from players made it apparent we did not hit the mark on one of our design strategy goals: clarity for the player. So we quickly jumped into action to identify next steps and resolve this for them.
Post-launch Strategy:
Following launch, user feedback highlighted key issues with the frontend play menu. To align the experience with our original vision, the team prioritized a series of post-launch quality-of-life improvements. As the UX feature owner, I led this initiative by defining the problem space, aligning stakeholders, and determining how to evolve the menu while accounting for the constraints of a live-service environment. My discovery process included gathering data from analytics, reviewing player anecdotes from social media, and considering the trends from our competitors.
Findings:
Updated Design & Development Approach:
Once the issues were identified, I partnered closely with stakeholders to define an action plan that addressed the most critical problems quickly while ensuring player goals and preferences were reflected in the solution. In parallel, I accounted for implementation constraints, working with the team to structure updates as incremental improvements rather than a single sweeping change. This resulted in a multi-phased approach that prioritized high-impact updates for early delivery.
Learnings
A key learning from this process was the importance of ongoing communication with game operations after launch to support a live service environment. Rather than reacting to issues as they arise, I came to see the menu as a “living home” that requires continuous maintenance and iteration. Proactively refining and supporting the system is essential to delivering a consistent and successful player experience.