Total Rewards

Every year the rewards and compensation team paid an external company to mail a physical copy, and later a secure PDF, of an employee’s benefits and salary summary of the year. Our team decided a better solution would be an internal, secure website where employees could access the data any time as well as download a PDF for their personal records.

The original design was a little stale and didn’t feel Blizzard-y. I designed the new experience with World of Warcraft game assets to give it that Blizzard look and feel. We wanted the site to have a rich experience so we added parallaxing for the first time to an internal site. My main goal for the downloadable PDF was printer-friendliness while maintaining that game immersion feel, so of course I went with the most Blizzard-y element of all time - parchment paper. There was a lot of trial and error testing to make sure it looked great coming out of a standard printer, in color or black and white.

LESSONS LEARNED

One of Blizzard’s core values is “Think Globally,” which this project taught me in spades. In the beginning I mistakenly assumed the data for the United States was universal. Quite the opposite. During the build phase, engineers and I “discovered” (aka reading the complete 40 page requirements document) that each region needed different data which caused more than a few late nights for our team as we recalibrated designs and code to compensate.

In the end we were able to save the company around $35k a year with our solution.