One App.
Twenty Years.

Role

Lead UX — Halo Waypoint

Owned the full product experience across iOS and Android: IA, navigation, onboarding, core flows, and research.

Responsibilities

Problem definition

User flows

Information architecture

Wireframes

Prototype and validation

Team

3 Engineers · 1 PM · 2 Artists

Date

2021

The Problem

Halo Channel was gone.
Players had nowhere to go.

Halo Channel was canceled years ago. For five years players had nowhere to go. A browser. A console. Nothing built for the pocket. Each title carried its own data model. Twenty years of history with no single place to hold it.

Halo Channel error — data required to initialize could not be retrieved

Before — Halo Channel App

Decisions that unified
the ecosystem.

01Tooling

Figma wasn't a preference. It was a decision.

We had been working in Adobe XD in isolation. I moved the team to Figma to give us a shared source of truth, real-time collaboration, and a foundation for a component system that could scale across Infinite and legacy titles.

Workflow audit

One File. One Team.

We moved to Adobe XD originally to use Xbox input controls for previous in-game features. When that requirement dropped, Figma was the obvious next step. It was becoming the industry standard. One shared file, real-time collaboration, and a component system the team built once that scaled across every title.

Built by the team in Figma

Icon Library — Figma

Button system — Figma

02Information Architecture

Same mental model. Native foundation.

Waypoint existed on the web. Players already had a mental model for where things lived. I mapped a native mobile IA that respected what players already knew while building a structure that could support Infinite and every legacy title without feeling like a port.

Main navigation IA for Halo Infinite — Waypoint

Navigation audit

Same Map. New Territory.

Waypoint's web experience was being redesigned in parallel. Close communication, daily stand-ups, and frequent design sessions kept both platforms aligned. Same structure. Different canvas.

Web IA

Dry erase board sessions

03Mobile UX

Mobile needed what the web never had to solve for.

Building the mobile IA surfaced the core problems the web never had to solve. Mobile patterns, interactions and sign-in/sign-out. None of it existed yet.

Mobile UX

New platform. New problems.

Sign-in and sign-out had to be rethought entirely for mobile. The flow ran through Xbox Live, so I mapped that authentication process before designing anything. I surfaced notification permissions early, before sign-up, so players understood what they were agreeing to. Mapping the full flow revealed that some players would want to skip or didn't have Xbox Live. I designed for both paths.

Sign-in and sign-out flow — Figma

04Navigation

The navigation never changed. The game did.

I built a single persistent bottom navigation anchored by Home, Career, Game History, Customization, and Profile. Visual theming adapted to the active title. Players could move between Halo 5, MCC, and Fireteam Raven without relearning the app. The navigation never moved.

Halo Waypoint — Games tab before and after

Navigation audit

Every Game. One Persistent Nav.

Five tabs anchored every experience in the app. Home, Career, Games, History, and Profile. Each one had a clear job and never moved regardless of which title a player was in.

Waypoint vNext game-title flow — signed in

Persistent five-tab nav — Figma

The wireframes below show two of those screens from concept to final UI.

Home: Wireframe · Final UI

H5 Service Record: Wireframe · Final UI

05Research

We tested it before players did.

I partnered with the Microsoft Research team to run usability sessions across iOS and Android builds before launch. Every round of testing produced an Expert Report that fed directly back into design decisions.

Research

Interaction over instruction.

Before testing, the signed-in first-time user experience was too linear and text-heavy. Every screen required a tap to move forward. Players had no choice but to go in order. The Expert Report made it clear. I redesigned the flow so players could tap into any section from the bottom navigation and interact with it directly. The experience explained itself through interaction, not instruction.

Before

FTUE · Game Management Wires — Figma

After

FTUE Game Management Final UI

06Companion Design

Infinite in Your Pocket.

The Vision Lead and I defined Spartan customization and Battle Pass progression as the core of the companion experience. I designed mobile-first flows for browsing armor cores, managing loadouts, tracking XP, and moving through tiers. Players never had to boot up the game to manage their Spartan.

Halo Infinite mobile companion — armor customization

Flow mapping

Same Spartan. Smaller Screen.

The in-game Infinite customization system was the reference. I mirrored its structure for mobile while keeping it aligned with the shared Waypoint navigation patterns. The magic moment was simple. Customize your Spartan from your pocket, launch the game, see it reflected.

Halo Infinite progression — console wireframes

Progression Wires — Figma

Halo Infinite — cross-platform companion

Progression UI WIP

Customization — Figma

Customization UI WIP

One App.
Twenty Years.

Decisions that unified
the ecosystem.