A full home redesign for Brazil's largest competitive gaming platform, shipped in 3 weeks. Making it appealing to our users and detailing all the interactions and user feedback.
The heatmap said it all: interaction stopped at the header menu.
About less than 20 users a day visited and scrolled the home, mostly to screenshot the ranking or hunt for the anti-cheat download buried at the bottom. Ads filled both side rails, every section had the same visual weight, and nothing below the fold earned attention.
| Role | Product Designer (Senior) + Research OPS |
|---|---|
| Focus | UX&UI, Information Architecture, Research and Research OPS |
| Collaborators | Product, Stakeholders, Engineering |
| Timeline | 3 weeks | 2023 |
A major event was coming, with an activation strategy converting free users into paying customers. The home would be the first contact for the new wave.
Deadline: 3 weeks, shipped. With that timeline, the obvious move was a visual facelift.
Solo on design, research and research OPS.
The PM ran the same prioritization interview with stakeholders in parallel, so we could cross both perspectives and build the correlation matrix together.
What the data said: heatmap concentrated on the header menu. ~20 users a day on the page.
Why: I asked my Research OPS base, 60+ engaged users on Discord, no incentive, answers in hours. They only opened the home for two things:
Everything else: straight to "Play." The home wasn't part of anyone's routine.
Instead of asking "what do you want to see on the home?", I mapped the product's entire architecture: every page, what it offered, and how often users looked for it.
*In competitive gaming, support is part of the loop (reporting cheaters, appealing bans), not product friction.
I crossed two perspectives, with different weights:
The matrix ordered the home not by intuition or internal politics, but by where each element would take the user next:
a journey with rhythm, from the top of the page to the end.
Users search for it with intent: they'll scroll to find it wherever it is. At the end, that intent carries them through all the content in the middle. More sections discovered, more ads seen. Intentional friction, serving monetization, without breaking the user's goal.
Each section earns the next scroll: what users came for at the top, discovery in the middle, intent-driven content at the end. Ads placed along the journey instead of competing with it.
And I had the freedom to propose new components but with that I had to detail every interaction and journey
Two months after launch, a deskresearch and a survey confirmed the change held:
I solved the engagement problem, but never instrumented the financial return: ad impressions, page revenue, conversions attributed to the home. Today, on any project touching monetization, I define those metrics with PM and data before launch, not after. Engagement validated the experience. Business return would have closed the loop.
The 60+ user base didn't exist by luck. Building research infrastructure before you need it is what makes 3-week timelines survivable.
The same sections in a different sequence produce a different business result. Architecture is invisible craft.
The Help Center at the end serves the user who searches with intent and the business that needs the journey. Both, on purpose.
The metric you don't configure is the impact you can't claim.
A research ops redesign for a Brazilian gaming platform, where the real problem wasn't the survey tool: it was why anyone answered at all.
