Role
UX Lead driving touch gameplay strategy. UI/UX team of 5
Team setup
Newly formed internal touch-focused UX, UI and engineering group, collaborating with the external mobile production team.
Impact areas
HUD · controls · in-game tutorials · cross-team workflows · internal touch knowledge ownership
Timeline
1 year
Problem framing
A fragmented touch experience in a AAA ecosystem
Fortnite's mobile development had been fully outsourced for six years.
When Epic decided to bring touch to the center of Battle Royale, they built a new internal team from scratch — engineers, UI, UX — and I joined to lead it.
My role wasn't clearly defined yet, so I spent my first weeks doing the opposite of jumping into deliverables: I played. A lot.
I observed how the production actually worked day to day, where decisions got made, and where they got stuck. Then I ran a comprehensive UX audit of the mobile game, which surfaced the issues that would shape everything that came after:
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The external team had limited involvement in the core Battle Royale teams
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Touch complexity was underestimated early by the core team, making issues expensive to solve later on touch
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The HUD evolved feature-by-feature instead of systemically, increasing visual clutter
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Ecosystem notifications competed with gameplay focus
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Controls required excessive manual input, affecting flow and immersion
The goal
Position touch as a gameplay priority through cross-team collaboration
It quickly became clear my efforts would split into two distinct areas: one rooted in gameplay UX itself, the other in process and production.
01
Reduce unnecessary manual interactions in core controls
Partner with UI teams to define a scalable HUD hierarchy across Battle Royale and ecosystem layers
FTUE: Reduce cognitive load by restructuring tutorial triggers and information timing
02
Oversee the seasonal work reaching the external mobile team, to support their execution and understand their needs
Give visibility to the audit's findings and their downstream impact beyond mobile, to find solutions together with other teams
Build relationships with internal teams to gain a deeper understanding of each mechanic and UI requirement from the source
Make touch-specific work and improvements visible across the studio, to grow shared knowledge of touch design
Key decisions
01
Define a scalable HUD hierarchy across Battle Royale and ecosystem layers
No one had ever really paid attention to the mobile HUD before. The external team did what they could to keep up with the demanding timelines and avoid overlaps, but some were simply unavoidable within the existing structure.
My arrival happened to coincide with the start of a UI UX HUD redesign across all of Fortnite's shooter modes — so staying aligned with that team was critical, even though the refreshed UI wouldn't reach mobile until much later for production reasons.
Timing aside, the external UI team and I designed our own vision for a touch HUD. One that was fully achievable even within the constraints of the old UI.
The UI team and I looked at competitors and action games with complex HUDs for inspiration, then ran a UX audit mapping out every current on-screen element in boxes. That gave us conceptual clarity on which areas could be grouped or simplified.
I pushed the UI team to go wild on areas that had quietly grown complex over time without much scrutiny — squad mates' vitals being the clearest example, an area that had been eating up a disproportionate amount of screen space.
That freedom also let us fix a long-standing inconsistency for touch: the map could finally sit exactly where players expected it coming from other platforms, instead of being mirrored to the opposite side.
02
Reduce unnecessary manual interactions in core controls
Playing a shooter on mobile means working with more limited controls and slower reaction capacity than on other platforms — and matches tend to be shorter too.
That combination meant we had to push hard to reduce controller-related frustration wherever we could. Identifying and improving those friction points became a joint effort: some came directly from my audit, others were ideas from engineers and designers across the team. It was a genuinely cross-discipline process, with heavy testing and feedback at every step.
Some of the autocomes: autorun triggers, automate pickups, throw to self healing items, pings...
03
Rethink interaction systems for true cross-platform consistency
Fortnite is a massive game that grew extremely fast. When that happens, there's rarely time to design systems that scale — only to ship systems that work.
Add touch controls that had been set aside for years, and it wasn't hard to find opportunities to rethink some of those systems from the ground up.
The NPC wheel
This system was designed to handle far more than NPC interactions — vending machines, upgrade benches, and similar systems all ran through it. On mobile, part of the added friction came from requiring a confirm button to lock in a selection: the opposite of what feels native on touch. That constraint became the opening to rethink the system more broadly, in ways that ended up improving it across every platform, not just mobile.
Tutorial tips
These were meant to inform players about seasonal changes affecting gameplay, or teach specific interactions. Beyond removing a few messages from features that no longer existed in the game, no one had ever done a holistic review of the system.
I took that on myself, going through more than 100 messages one by one: checking which were still relevant, rewriting some for clarity, and hiding a large number we agreed were no longer necessary. Several also had broken triggers, which we fixed to make them fire more efficiently. The impact was felt across every platform, but mobile benefited the most — sharpening focus on the FTUE by cutting down on unnecessary interruptions.
Impact
Established a mobile-first UX foundation for Fortnite BR experiences
I'm proud of what this work represents: the most progress touch had seen in-house to date, achieved alongside — not instead of — several season's worth of parallel work. With limited UI and engineering resources and a tight timeline, I kept the team focused on a single goal: closing the gap between touch and controller, even without the resources to fully bridge it.
That meant making calls on what to prioritize when everything felt urgent, pushing for structural changes — like the HUD hierarchy and the interaction wheel — instead of settling for quick patches, and building the cross-team trust needed to get touch taken seriously as a first-class platform.
It also meant jumping in wherever the team needed me most: I contributed directly to major rushed features like the Speak to Darth Vader button, and supported the Blitz team — Fortnite's first mobile-specific game mode — through a high-stakes launch and the bug-fixing sprints that followed. Both were high-pressure, high-impact moments that came on top of the core touch roadmap, not instead of it.
I hope these learnings carry forward into other experiences, and into smoother play for everyone on touch.
Other actions taken worth mentioning:
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Created a touch component library and base layout for Fortnite designers to start from
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Set structured collaboration between internal and external production and UI/UX teams
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Established touch as a first-class platform requirement from feature kickoff across UI/UX teams
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Acted as mobile gameplay UX partner from early feature definition with internal teams
Supported the external mobile team during later implementation phases with UX work and feedback
Connected teams through shared visibility of upcoming features and touch constraints
Promoted ownership of cross-platform UX decisions and shared best practices of touch design within Epic to grow internal expertise
