BlizzCon is one of the biggest gaming events in North America. I worked on the BlizzCon app (and infrastructure) for 5 years running. In that time, we took the app from a on-site event calendar for the 40,000 live attendees to a video content, shopping and news experience for tens of millions at home that brought in millions more in revenue.

40K In-Person Attendees

10M Watched Online

15%+ in Mobile Attributed Revenue

The "virtual ticket" was introduced in 2009 as a way for online attendees to watch BlizzCon but video streaming was young. The BlizzCon Guide app launched in 2011, primarily for on-site attendees (event schedule and a map). By 2015, it minimally included simple live streams but it had a bigger future.

In my time at Blizzard, I helped evolve it from a simple on-site tool to an integral part of the virtual ticket video experience, a news and esports hub as well as a key shopping vector for selling merchandise.

The 2015 and 2016 versions of the BlizzCon app did offer video streaming with virtual ticket but the experience was simple. Live streams per stage and a chronological video archive available after each event was over.

The design team focused primarily on feedback from attendees about the usablity of the event calendar and the on-site store. Each year brought celebrated improvement to those features but many of them were limited by our back-end. It wasn't until 2017 that we started driving serious additional value by adding filtering, content categories, on-demand video, an esports hub, and online shopping.

2017 was the first year that the BlizzCon Mobile App brought significant value on its own (not just a convenience). Many features of the app were free but 2018 was the year that it started selling more virtual tickets (and merchandise).

We refined the UX patterns as we included customer feedback but the design team also focused on highlighting what customers got if they upgraded to the virtual ticket: highlighting which streams were paywalled, explaining the goody bag and other rewards as well as thoughtful upsell patterns (in Blizzard brand tone) which had double digit increases to conversion.

We also added a Smart TV app, Chromecast/Airplay and 1080p streaming support bolstering the value of the mobile experience and evolving well-beyond simply "a guide".

A big part of BlizzCon is how big the line you wait in for exclusive on-site merchandise is. The store was always situated on a different floor or building away from the main conference. Communicating the size of the line so people could plan their day became important (not to mention that exclusive items…sell out quickly).

This was a problem for mobile to solve:

In 2015, it was hacky (an unlisted blog feed with a feature image field that was changed updating a VPN laptop onsite).

In 2016, working with the store team and a new vendor, we developed "Blink Shopping" enabling attendees to order via mobile and pickup up using an emailed QR code (we still used the blog feed for sold out items and line wait times but it looked more elegant), we also offered a link out to the mobile web version of the online store.

By 2017 and 2018, we had become much more advanced - using low-power Bluetooth beacons with a light internal mobile app for store employees to instantly set and manage line wait/Blink Shopping times. Working with Fanatics, we also added a web-based shop allowing virtual attendees to buy merchandise directly from the app.