Two engineers built a backend for game developers and continued working on it after Warner Bros. acquired it.
Each new feature brought another dashboard page and another navigation link.
By the time I joined, nearly 1,000 pages covered everything from game items and levels to debugging, with no coherent design or organization.
I indexed the features and grouped them into high-level categories.
The new side navigation made the product understandable as a set of related tools, rather than a running list of everything that had ever been built.
Redesigning every page individually was not practical.
I created a design system for forms, calendars, cards, and tables, giving the team a consistent language to apply across existing pages and future features.
A developer might work with the item editor, character-level tools, and debugger together.
I made it possible to save that combination as a workstation and return to it from the top of the side navigation, without finding each tool again.
I created role-based states so people could enter the workspace as an administrator or customer-support user, with the relevant tools organized for that role.
Teams could be assigned those states rather than sharing one undifferentiated dashboard.
Forms, calendars, cards, and tables give the backend a consistent foundation.
Consistent field states, selection controls, and module layouts carry the same interaction patterns across tools.