Role
Senior UX Designer
Duration
1 year
Date
2025
Square Enix
I led the evolution of Square Enix’s fragmented websites into a cohesive digital ecosystem. By architecting a novel design system framework and establishing a collaborative UX strategy, I helped reduce design and development time by 75% while revitalising team morale.
Challenges
Siloed business units each managed their own parts of the Square Enix website.
The brand, video game and eStore sites each had distinct branding and behaviour with few shared components and countless variations of elements such as buttons, navigation bars and page layouts.
This created a confusing experience for users and was hugely inefficient for the business. A lack of innovation and repetitive groundwork caused basic projects to take upwards of 12 weeks with low team morale.
The UX failed to reflect the quality of Square Enix’s most beloved video games.
Many of Square Enix’s 250+ websites had moderate and severe usability issues with no adherence to UX heuristics. Information was poorly organised and presented: on one game website fewer than 0.5% of visitors viewed important information about the game.
A “bad” Trustpilot rating of 1.7/5 reflected the company’s poor perception amongst fans, the most common complaints being the outdated UI and fragmented UX.
Nearly 95% of project requests from internal stakeholders gave no explanation of what was trying to be achieved or why.
A broad lack of UX and user research awareness in the business made it difficult to justify design decisions and push back on arbitrary requests.
With minimal stakeholder collaboration and vague criteria for success, many projects failed to meet anyone’s expectations.
Process
I embedded design thinking and evidence-based decision making into the team’s delivery process, and reframed stakeholders’ requests by introducing a user-centred briefing form. This ensured a thorough understanding of the problem being solved, why it was a problem, and who it affected.
I built cross-departmental trust by introducing dedicated collaboration touchpoints during the design process, and championed UX across the business by presenting the new design-led strategy to stakeholders at C-suite, Executive Director and Senior Director levels.
I created a novel design system framework to better manage numerous video game brands.
The framework allowed for multiple ‘child’ design systems to inherit from a single ‘parent’ design system, ensuring text size, interactions and breakpoints would be consistent across all websites while allowing unique fonts, styles and colours for each brand.
This framework pushed Figma to its technical limits and necessitated a fundamental shift to greater collaboration between designers and developers, which I spearheaded through regular meetings and workshops.
I laid the foundation for a unified and modernised digital ecosystem.
Alongside the Director of Digital Development, I mapped user journey diagrams for the fragmented websites, identifying areas for increased engagement, conversion and cohesion.
We architected the new Square Enix Digital Ecosystem: a seamless web experience connecting the previously isolated brand, video game and eStore sites.
Within the new ecosystem, the team delivered projects with a newfound emphasis on UX, alleviating many of the historical usability issues while introducing modernised layouts and industry standards. The new websites finally began to reflect the prestige of Square Enix’s most beloved video games.
Outcomes
By implementing the design-led delivery process and unified UX strategy, we achieved measurable gains in delivery time and usability.
The design evolution also coincided with a cultural transformation. Breaking down historical siloes reduced friction between departments and fostered an environment of collaboration, skill-sharing and mutual respect.
Feedback
I would like to stress how Elis’s strong problem-solving skills and independence of thought has unlocked the whole team’s potential.
Director, Digital Platforms
Elis has managed to accomplish a lot and has showcased inherent leadership skills. We need people like Elis to help drive us forward and encourage the best out of those around us.
Director, Digital Development