Reducing Discovery Friction
D&D Beyond | Product Designer
Executive Summary
D&D Beyond houses an enormous library of game content, including spells, monsters, feats, subclasses, equipment, and character options. While users could technically access this information, the browsing experience often made evaluating options unnecessarily difficult. Important filters were hard to discover, critical information was buried, and users frequently had to click deeply into content before determining whether something was relevant to their needs.
I redesigned core listing experiences to help users make faster decisions by improving discoverability, reducing unnecessary interaction costs, and surfacing critical information earlier in the browsing experience.
The result was a faster, more efficient content discovery experience that helped users find relevant information with less friction—without requiring a large-scale platform redesign.
The Process
I worked within a full-stack product team responsible for balancing live operations work, ad hoc requests, feature development, and larger platform initiatives. Because the platform was live and heavily used, a complete redesign wasn’t realistic.
The challenge became identifying where focused improvements could create meaningful user impact without introducing unnecessary disruption.
I started by reviewing behavioral friction in the existing experience and gathering user feedback around how players searched for content. As patterns emerged, one insight became increasingly clear: users didn’t need more information—they needed faster evaluation.
That shifted the project from a traditional listing redesign into a broader decision-making problem.
From there, I focused on improving how users moved through large content systems by making filters easier to discover, reducing unnecessary clicks, improving information hierarchy, and surfacing critical information earlier in the browsing process.
Rather than redesigning the ecosystem, the work focused on making the existing ecosystem easier to navigate.
The Problem
D&D Beyond serves a wide range of users navigating an enormous amount of information. New players are often learning game systems for the first time, experienced players are optimizing character builds, and Dungeon Masters are frequently searching for campaign resources.
Despite these different needs, users often encountered the same friction: browsing large content libraries took too much effort.
The issue wasn’t access to content. It was the speed and confidence of evaluation. Users struggled to quickly compare options, identify useful filters, and understand meaningful differences between pieces of content without repeatedly clicking into individual pages.
The platform enabled browsing, but it slowed decision-making.
That friction affected both newer users overwhelmed by volume and experienced users trying to move quickly through complex datasets.
Results & Learnings
The redesign improved browsing efficiency, increased filter usage, and helped users reach relevant content faster.
More importantly, this project reinforced a principle that continues to show up throughout my work:
Complexity is rarely solved by adding more tools. It’s often solved by helping people make decisions faster.
This project strengthened my ability to create meaningful impact inside highly constrained product environments where full redesigns aren’t feasible. It also reinforced the importance of improving decision velocity in large information ecosystems—a lesson that continues to shape how I approach product design today.