Riot Games—Design Career
Riot Games occupies a rare summit in the modern world, crafting the digital arenas where millions gather to witness the height of human competition. In this landscape, Esports is not merely a hobby; it is a global architecture of devotion, spanning continents and cultures.
For more than a year, I served as a guide for the Esports team, weaving together the fragmented threads of their digital universe into a single, cohesive tapestry: the Riot Esports Network. My task was to anchor the sprawling experiences of League of Legends, Valorant, and Teamfight Tactics into a singular sanctuary where fans could witness the climb of their heroes across every screen.
When the needs of the organization shifted and the project was stilled, I pivoted my focus to building and evolving each game’s Esports website. I led the strategic efforts to evolve the digital homes for these competitive worlds, ensuring each had the structural integrity to support the weight of its own legacy.
What follows are the remnants of that journey — the moments where design met the complexity of human play.
Riot Esports Network
Web & Mobile Experience
Overview: After working on Riot Esports Network (REN) for a few months, I was asked to help define the web platform’s information architecture and navigation paradigm. I dove in and began thinking about how to organize the web experience in a way that balanced fan mental models with where the organization wanted to take the experience in the future. Along the way, I recognized that many existing pages on the platform lacked structural consistency, so during this effort, I also drove the design and implementation of a page header design pattern along with navigation.
Process Summary: I paired with a UX and Visual Designer, working with them through the entire design process to produce, review, up-level, and evaluate design solutions, helping the team better-understand how fans thought about Esports information hierarchies and up-leveling our solution. Once the navigational structure was solidified, I worked with stakeholders to implement consistent page structures across all existing pages in the product.
Business Impact: Introduced the foundation upon which all other pages and experiences were built into REN moving forward, and achieved structural consistency across all existing and future pages on the platform through a unified and scalable header pattern.
Watching Live Study
Web & Mobile Experience
Overview: This is a unique project, featuring a design concept stimulus that tackled REN’s primary goal: to be the best place to watch Riot’s Esports. At the time, Twitch and YouTube were market-dominant, but purely out of necessity; from our target audience’s perspective, these platforms were simply “good enough.” When I joined the team, we had already built a bespoke live watch experience for fans on REN; the issue was that our target audience was decidedly indifferent about using it over Twitch or YouTube.
Process Summary: I pitched a project strategy + plan, gained leadership alignment to invest, oriented the team around a set of tenets rooted in segmentation research, and led 2 Designers (UX and Visual) and 2 Product Managers through a process that led us to Seoul, South Korea, where we evaluated a design concept stimulus (shown in the video above) during League of Legends’ biggest international event of the year, Worlds 2023.
Business Impact: Delivered a live watch experience that significantly increased our target audience’s expressed willingness to switch from market-dominant platforms (Twitch and YouTube) to watch Esports on REN, and slotted this work into the Product Roadmap for REN’s public launch.
Fan Quotes:
“I would always use this over Twitch or YouTube. You just click what you want to get it.”
“It’s like you’re in an actual arena. Wow. When can we use this version?”
“This is what I actually expect from Riot [compared to the first experience].”
Compete TFT
Web Experience
Overview: In late 2025, I was tasked with defining the end-to-end experience for Team Fight Tactics (TFT) Esports. The goal of this website was to not just provide all of the information and scoring that fans would be looking for, but it was even more so focused on building a full feature set for up-and-coming players who wanted to go pro, allowing them to sign up for events, follow qualification, check-in for matches and more, all with the ultimate goal of being the one-stop-shop for anything competitive TFT (hence the name of the website).
Process Summary: Over the course of three months, my process evolved from closely integrating with the subject matter experts on TFT’s Esports team to delivering high fidelity design communicating an end-to-end experience for TFT pros and fans rooted and clarity and celebration of the pro-journey. I spent countless hours with incredible teammates who walked me through the competitive structure of TFT (how each event and tier of competition is connected) and all of the detailed requirements for player qualification across the different regions around the world in order to distill the complex behind-the-scenes logistics into a beautifully simple solution.
Problem: Team Fight Tactics’ Esports competitive play (and fan following) had been largely run by disparate Google spreadsheets and 3rd party platforms that lacked cohesion, trust, and clear informational content about how TFT’s Esports worked, especially if you were interested in competing.
Business Impact: Through tight collaboration and a tenets-based focused on building clarity across the system, I delivered an end-to-end website for the first and second iterations of the experience that fans and players were incredibly excited about. The website sees more usage than any other competitive TFT platform to-date. If you’d like to see more, check out the live website.
Valorant Esports
Web Experience
Overview: In early 2025, I shifted my focus away from REN towards improving the event and standings experience for fans interested in following Valorant Esports throughout the season.
Process Summary: Because of how much this project depended on operational decisions owned by Riot (how teams, regions and leagues are structured), I was able to uncover requirements and user needs during the design process, moving quickly and building a design solution that made it easy for fans to understand 1) the shape of the entire season, 2) individual event formats, qualifications, stage-by-stage results, stakes, and winners, and 3) the new competitive information hierarchy driven by Riot’s Competitive Operations team.
Problem: After running lightweight interviews with fans combined with anecdotal knowledge, it was evident that fans (and even many employees at Riot) had no idea how seasonal events were structured, and further, it was incredibly difficult find, access, and understand the state of standings during live or prior events across all of Riot’s Esports.
Business Impact: As time passed after launch, we saw continued growth and usage of our website’s standings pages in comparison to third-party websites that had previously filled the void for finding event information. If you’d like to see more, check out the live website.
League of Legends Esports
Web Experience
Overview: In early 2025, the team embarked on a sprint to improve the function and clarity of the League of Legends Esports home page as well as the process by which fans accessed standings across regional and international events.
Process Summary: Starting with analytics data, then defining tenets to rationalize the role of the Home and Standings pages, I reshaped the Home experience to function as the live pulse of the sport’s matches such that it behaved like a schedule, then re-architected the approach to the Standings navigation item into an Events navigation dropdown that helped fans easily see all of the events in the season, what was live, upcoming or completed, and then get standings and any other event-specific info on dedicated Event pages that houses a Standings tab within them; a far more clear and representative structure of the competitive logistics of the sport.
Problem: For the past several years, the Home page had no clear role when it came to addressing any specific user journeys on the website, and further, the team had no ability to generate, aggregate, recommend, or present user-preferred content on the Home page. Aside from the Home page, standings across events were accessed via a single “Standings” navigation item, which obscured the multi-event structure of the sport and made it extremely difficult to get all of the details about any given event.
Business Impact: The Home Screen’s usage radically increased over time, and the use of the individual Event pages to access deeper information about qualifying teams, brackets, and the status of events proved to be an essential addition to the web experience for fans. If you’d like to see more, check out the live website.
Mentorship & Guidance
Design Lead
Design Leadership: As the UX Lead for the REN platform, I defined and evangelized the vision for Esports at Riot and established the quality bar for Design & Product. I helped define projects, identified and re-oriented Product priorities around key points of product differentiation, instilled Design rituals and executed Design team resourcing changes to better-align my team’s output with shifting organizational goals, was responsible for all customer-facing experiences worldwide, and, when necessary, I rolled up my sleeves and delivered hi-fidelity UX, Visual, and Motion design solutions.
Internal Design Mentorship: Throughout my time on REN, I mentored four mid-senior level designers across UX and Visual Design to grow their respective careers, particularly focusing on holistic problem-solving, and upping the quality bar.
Graduate Student Mentorship: I spent one year guiding the design / research process and project output of two Georgia Tech graduate students focused on building an Esports experience focused on addressing gender and racial minorities.
One More Thing
A Short Retrospective
Leading design for Riot’s Esports properties was about so much more than building interfaces; it required deep psychological excavation into what drives people to become fans in order to find the primal, human pulse behind the pixels. I found true resonance in mentoring younger designers and working with a team of people who remain the most remarkable group I’ve ever worked with — a collection of brilliant, authentically eccentric humans who taught me that the most profound work tends to take shape when the people behind it are authentically themselves in the workplace.