Bungie

Bungie / SIE — Senior UX Technical Designer (16.3)
Oct 2022 – Jul 2026 (Remote)

At a glance
- Focus: Destiny 2 Commerce UX in the Tiger engine
- Strength: Shipping modular, maintainable UX through pivots, handoffs, and shifting timelines
- Keywords: Season Pass, Destiny Announcements, Eververse, Timeline, Recommendations

Featured case studies
- Inbox (Destiny Announcements)
Role: Owned the majority of Tech UX design/implementation, plus cross-discipline coordination and documentation.
Outcome: Shipped a long-awaited player-facing inbox that reduced popup friction and enabled reusable integration points (including Director entry).
- [Season Pass (Episodes / 3-Act model)]
Role: Drove the content-authored navigation logic and wrote the spec for a scalable “jump to” navigation addition.
Outcome: Delivered a clean architectural extension that supported a 200‑reward track + Act gating and enabled future pivots with a smooth handoff.

Historical overview
I worked primarily in the Tiger engine on Destiny 2 Commerce UX surfaces—owning feature implementation and upkeep while partnering across disciplines to ship stable, player-facing experiences through pivots, handoffs, and shifting timelines. I also supported other teams through critical bug fixing, refactoring, documentation, and coordination to keep features moving and reduce long-term upkeep.

In my final ~3 months at Bungie, I shifted to Marathon to support major feature work and bug fixing—helping stabilize UX and UX-supported features during a period of heavy change.

Core feature areas (Commerce)
- Timeline updates
- Eververse Store
- Season Pass
- Destiny Announcements

Achievements (highlights)
- Shipped and maintained Commerce UX features at a high stability bar, including inherited work that required fast ramp-up and decisive problem-solving.
- Delivered a major Season Pass evolution (expanded rewards + Act gating) and improved navigation scalability via a spec-driven “jump to” enhancement.
- Improved the Dungeon Key upsell workflow with a scalable approach that reduced ongoing intervention and made future additions more efficient.
- Built and shipped new UI/screens end-to-end under shifting requirements (including Rally (Call To Arms)), supported by documentation that enabled smoother handoffs.
- Drove Inbox (Destiny Announcements) to completion despite multi-year pauses and ownership changes, using modular implementation, tracking, and thorough documentation to enable parallel work and integrations.
- Known for clear, detailed bug reporting and for unblocking teams quickly when priorities shifted or urgent issues emerged.

What I did across projects
- Turn product intent into shippable UX: translate goals into concrete UI behaviors, states, and content-authored logic.
- Design for reuse and low upkeep: modular setups, scalable patterns, and pragmatic scope decisions near ship.
- Operate across disciplines: align UX, visual design, engineering, and content/investment to keep work moving.
- Document for continuity: write feature briefs/specs and implementation docs that make handoffs low-friction.

Roles / Skills (outline)
- Role(s): Senior UX Technical Designer
- Responsibilities: Technical UX implementation, feature upkeep, bug fixing, refactoring, documentation, cross-team coordination, risk/tech-debt identification
- Strengths: Modular systems thinking, fast ramp-up, clear communication, pragmatic scope decisions, high stability bar
- Media: Screenshots withheld due to NDA

Overview
The timeline was an interesting feature. For a long time it was the home of the game credits section, but it also offered insight to the entire history of Destiny 2 and all of the expansions. It was important in that older content that was archived ("Vaulted"), was able to be seen in a linear fashion. It was also a place to view where we are now and what is coming next.

Over time the "nodes" got more complex with animations and full screen visual backdrops. As the game progressed past the expect final expansion, "The Final Shape", it became necessary to refactor the feature and add additional sustainability.

User Problem
- I want to understand the historical progression of Destiny 2.
- I want to see what expansions I own in within the release structure.
- I want to understand where I/We are in the games progression.
- I want to be able to revisit/replay past parts of the game.
- I want a glimpse of what comes next.

Success Criteria
- For the post Final Shape era and eventual end of support, we had to polish up and seal the timeline.
- During this period of Timeline updates, over a year, we quickly realized that the system was not easy to expand so we needed to refactor the timeline nodes and the functionality of the background display to be more expandable and smooth.
- Remove tech debt and increase screen performance.

Constraints / Complexity
- Like many features of a game with this age, there were layers of tech debt and lack of optimization.
- We were not sure how many additional releases there would be.
- Most of the nodes were designed in a very bespoke manner and required unification.

My Role
- With the assistance of investment design, I devised a plan to refactor the nodes and documented a future set of goals to refactor the entire system to permit all future work to be done dynamically instead of manually.
- Added the required components to support the remaining releases.

What I Delivered
- In the end we were able to support the remaining nodes.
- Removed old "heavy" animated backgrounds for the nodes.
- Refactored node and sub-node displays.
- Modified the data layout to show backgrounds for all expansions and not just the current.
- Increased the fidelity of the full screen background displays.

Key Decisions
- While it was treated as an afterthought, the timeline would become an important feature over the last year of Destiny 2 support. It would be the record of nearly 10 years of updates. It was determined that it needed more love as a result.
- Removing expensive and ultimately unnecessary animations improved loading and readability.
- Refactoring, cleaning up and streamlining the nodes was a big step towards a dynamic system that was not realized before the end of service.

Outcome / Impact
- The final release is a clean, streamlined and beautiful representation of the history of Destiny 2.

Skills / Tools
- I was able to focus primarily on the tech design on this one. A lot of refactoring, and cleanup. Replacing old nodes with the new version as a template vs. a copy paste, made it much more flexible and looks more uniform on screen.
- I did collaborate heavily with investment design as to how we move forward.
- I wore my UX hat on this as it was an upkeep feature and did not have a designer assigned to it.

Overview
As part of the commerce team at Bungie, one of my primary systems was the Eververse. This was an important system/feature of the game as it was one of the primary sources of revenue on this live-service, free to play game.

While the feature had long been in the game at the time I started, it was a core responsibility of mine to do updates, bug fixes, and add-on feature work.

User Problem
- There are too many items to browse and I don't want to spend all of my time shopping.
- I cannot find items I actually like.
- I want a more targeted experience.

Success Criteria
- Leaving the overall experience feeling familiar while adding a new complex feature that is accessible and easy to understand.
- Giving a new, meaningful, experience to our players.

Constraints/Complexity
- The Eververse has been in place for a long time and had years of iteration and tech debt.
- Much of the design and frame work was extremely rigid and was not always designed with the future in mind.
- Despite the player-facing feature having a very subtle change, the technical webs had to be unwoven, cleaned up, refactored, and rebuilt to permit this feature to work.

My Role
- Working with a majority of the design disciplines (Engineering, Investment, Analytics, Art, UX, and Leadership), I had to work out the design in terms of what needed to change, removed or added.
- I had to understand how players would interact with it inside of the existing known frameworks.
- I had to use cross-discipline skills to proof and then deliver the final changes to ship.

What I Delivered
- Recommended Items
- The goal of this system was to take an overview of the players purchasing habits and curate a smaller list of the greater Eververse offerings. This was welcomed by players as it permitted them to "shop" more quickly and not require them to sift through a pretty large list of items. With the end of service announced, this feature is no longer in game.
- I was involved in refactoring the list of displayed categories at the top level of the store.
- I worked with investment design and engineering to create a new "vendor" to receive data for the required items.
- I created complex decision systems to determine what, where, and how to display items at the top level and in the sub-category level of the store.

Key Decisions
- What amount of the current tech needs to be refactored versus created fresh?
- Where were the critical focus areas that had to be addressed first to avoid overrun and prevent us from shipping the MVP?
- Ultimately we had to build new components that were exclusive to this system and rebuild the data structure for the key elements that are displayed in the storefront.

Outcome / Impact
Ultimately the change was very welcomed and utilized by players. It was considered a success critically and financially.

Skills / Tools
- Technical Design, Documentation, Corss-Discipline communications.

Overview
For The Final Shape release, the Season Pass pivoted to a time-gated Act structure and expanded from 100 to 200 rewards. The update introduced recurring engram accrual as XP was earned and added new navigation patterns so players could move through a much larger track quickly and confidently.

User problem
- A larger reward track needed to stay understandable and easy to navigate
- Time-gated Acts required clear progression and unlock timing without confusing players
- Players needed reasons to return throughout the season as narrative beats unlocked

Success criteria
- Deliver a scalable Season Pass experience that supports a larger track and Act-based gating
- Introduce new visual definitions and navigation that make the expanded track feel manageable
- Establish a foundation for future Season Pass evolution (even if this specific model was short-lived)

My scope
I focused on the navigation and content-driven logic that powered the Act structure. The goal was flexibility: the system needed to handle variable reward counts and up to three (or fewer) Acts without requiring constant engineering intervention.

Key challenges
- Act navigation had to work even as reward counts changed late in development
- The solution needed to be authored in content (not hard-coded), while still being predictable and easy for creators to control
- Navigation had to remain intuitive across multiple inputs (left/right navigation, Act buttons, and pagination)

Key decisions
- Identified early that Act buttons needed to “jump” to variable locations as the track changed, and that existing navigation wasn’t sufficient
- Wrote a spec + feature brief proposing a “jump to” addition to the navigation system
- Designed the “jump to” behavior to accept expressions (dynamic destinations) or explicit hierarchy points, simplifying creator control while keeping the system flexible

Outcome / impact
- Shipped a major overhaul by building cleanly on top of existing architecture, enabling later pivots (including removing the Act structure) without rework-heavy rewrites
- Thorough documentation enabled a clean handoff to the next Tech UX Designer for the following Season Pass iteration

Skills / tools
- Product-minded systems thinking, UX navigation design, content-driven logic, spec writing, cross-discipline alignment, documentation

Overview
Inbox (Destiny Announcements) reduced launch friction by moving critical messages out of disruptive popups and into a dedicated, reviewable inbox. Players could get into the game faster, then return to announcements when they were ready—without losing important information.

User problem
- Players were often hit with too many popups on entry
- Important messages were easy to skip by “mashing through” to get in-game
- Players had long requested a way to review announcements later, on their own time

Success criteria
- Ship a reliable storage-and-review surface for announcements
- Maintain clarity and discoverability without adding new friction
- Land the feature despite years of intermittent development, handoffs, and pivots

Constraints / complexity
- Multi-year development with multiple pauses, handoffs, and shifting ownership
- Long-running engineering work created risk of missed or untested gaps across pivots
- Needed strong tracking + documentation to keep parallel work moving and avoid rework

My role
I owned the majority of the technical UX design and implementation work, while also supporting art assets, troubleshooting engineering components and investment/data files, and coordinating across disciplines to keep the feature unblocked and on track for deadlines.

What I delivered
- Orbit injection point (the player-facing entry into announcements)
- Assembled art, built animations, and implemented states to keep the component immersive and game-consistent
- Cross-discipline alignment and proactive unblocking through assessment + communication
- Technical documentation, plus a reference/application map linking supporting docs across disciplines
- A modular approach that enabled multiple “injection points” (including Director integration) using existing tech rather than reinventing it

Key decisions
- Made deliberate scope calls near ship to minimize cuts and avoid late-stage pivots
- Prioritized a lightweight, modular design so the system could be reused and extended without heavy upkeep

Outcome / impact
- Shipped a long-awaited player-facing feature successfully, with only one known visual bug at launch
- Enabled inclusion in the Director screen through modular design and reusable integration points

Skills / tools
- Product-minded delivery, technical UX implementation, modular UI architecture, animation/state design, cross-team coordination, documentation, risk management