02 · UX Design
Shipped. Still in production.
EA Games
Pogo.com casual-gaming redesign
Lead UX for the end-to-end Pogo redesign
- Status
- Live at pogo.com
- Service
- UX design / research / product strategy
- Role
- UX design lead
- Scope
- Homepage, game detail, challenge central, category, navigation, mobile
- Team
- UX researcher · frontend · backend · three PMs
- Launched
- Global, phased
Pogo.com was one of EA Games' largest casual-gaming properties, spanning 50+ titles, but two decades of layered tech and content sprawl had left the product without a clear structure.
EA brought the studio in as design lead to run the redesign end-to-end, anchored by a 3,400-subscriber segmentation study, a behavior-first user journey, and a card-and-tile system built directly from research.
Release one cut the site footprint by more than half. Pogo.com launched globally on the new system and runs on it today.
Method · effort by phase
01 · Discovery
Full site audit and the first current-state sitemap in years gave an honest picture of the content footprint.
02 · Define
A 3,400-respondent segmentation survey plus remote video interviews refreshed the personas around five archetypes.
03 · Ideate
Cut the release-one footprint by over half and redesigned homepage, game detail, challenge central, category, and navigation around the core play loop.
04 · Prototype
Hand-off to engineering in iterative build cycles, supporting build without owning code.
05 · Implement
Design handed off at detailed visual stage; engineering carried the build through a phased global release.
What the work surfaced
The site had accreted, not designed
Twenty years of layered tech generations each added content without revisiting structure; the footprint was twice what players actually used.
Players return for the core loop, not the catalogue
One dominant journey held across every persona: find a challenge, play it, play a favorite game; everything that did not serve it came out.
Homepage borrows the catalogue-tile pattern from Netflix, Hulu, Amazon
A tile-and-row pattern players already knew from streaming and shopping did the wayfinding work for free: challenges first, then new content, then favorites.
Tiles only work if the game is legible in the tile
Players could not tell what each tile represented, so tiles were rebuilt to scale with the grid, label the game in large type, and show the category underneath.
Challenge cards need six data points, not two
Time remaining, event type, game tile, description, progression, and reward: every element earned its place through research.
Game detail was being skipped
Players only cared about available challenges and their progress, so the page stripped to a hero, a challenge strip, simplified details, and a blade drop-down for deeper info.
Category and challenge central share one pattern
Two technically different surfaces served the same job, so one shared grid pattern reduced design cost and kept the site legible at scale.
Navigation was too deep and too dense
The old nav ran 12+ items across three levels; the redesign cut it to 5 primary items at 1 level.
The artifacts, as wireframes
Shipped interfaces stay confidential. The structure is the deliverable: these are the wireframes the way they went to engineering.
Delivered
- Full site audit and current-state sitemap
- Cross-persona survey (thousands of paying and unpaid subscribers)
- Updated persona set
- Homepage redesign
- Challenge card system and motion study
- Game tile system and motion study
- Game detail page redesign
- Challenge central and category page redesigns
- Navigation redesign
- Mobile menu and device screens
Outcome
Pogo.com relaunched around the core play loop, with site footprint cut by over half for release one.
The redesigned site runs at pogo.com today, framed around what players actually come to do rather than two decades of layered content.
- Titles
- 50+ casual titles
- Research
- 3,400-subscriber segmentation study
- Reduction
- Site footprint cut by over 50% at R1
- Status
- Live at pogo.com
- Surface
- Web