ea games
Lead the redesign for pogo.com, an online gaming platform, to better compete in the market and serve the needs of EA Games' transforming user base
Services
User experience research
Marketing research
User experience design
Product management
Team augmentation
The Ask
Pogo.com is a two-decades-old freemium online gaming website that offers over 50 casual games from brands like Hasbro and PopCap Games. EA Games asked THEFT to lead a redesign of the platform and bring it in line with today's modern style. We conducted a 90-day design sprint to conceptualize, define, and pitch a product roadmap, MVP, and marketing strategy for the pogo.com website redesign. The end goal was an alpha build of the website, tested with a select group of users to validate design, tech and revenue changes before formal launch.
Our Approach
In twenty years the site had grown into Frankenstein’s monster: a massive amount of content with no defined structure in place. Bringing together quantitative and qualitative insights, we created newly updated personas to match our current target user. We then mapped out the user flows to understand the motivations of the users along their journey. With the main user goals identified, we then took the business goals and combined them into an experience that would meet both user and business expectations.
Within three months, we simplified the home page, put a new hierarchy into place, put more emphasis on game challenges, created a card system featuring important user motivation points, and eliminated the multitude of sub-pages users literally never touched in exchange for a clearer hierarchical structure.
Throughout the process, we implemented agile practices and trained the core team in agile methodology. THEFT's approach was to drip and share insights and iterations so that we could gather feedback effectively. We also helped screen for full-time employees to continue the project after our engagement ended.
Deliverables
We delivered in time for the website re-launch celebrating twenty years of pogo.com. By the end of the engagement, our client had received a full site audit, five user personas including motivations and goal, user flows, responsive screen designs, and a full website redesign including homepage and hierarchy, card system and motion study, game detail pages, challenge central redesign, and navigation redesign.
The Impact
After the redesign launched, there was an overwhelming positive response from users, many of whom had been loyal players for two decades. The reason this was so exciting was especially because of their age and loyalty, these users tend to normally have a strong aversion to change.
Pogo.com increased its annual revenue to $30 million and was able to increase revenue streams across all verticals. The results were presented to EA Games leadership who decided to grow an internal team and invest more heavily in this area of the business.