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Pogo.com generates more than $30M a year for EA Games across 50+ casual titles from Hasbro, PopCap, and others, 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.
Site audit of a product that had accreted content across Flash, Javascript, HTML, and mobile generations. Full current-state sitemap, mapping the site for the first time in years. Fast, honest picture of the content footprint and where the product had stopped serving the user.
Twenty years of layered tech generations (Flash, Javascript, HTML, then mobile) each added content without revisiting the structure. The first sitemap in years made visible what the team already suspected: the footprint was twice what the player actually used.
Research surfaced one dominant journey across every persona: find a challenge, play that challenge, play a favorite game. The redesign was shaped around that loop. Everything that did not serve it came out.
Rather than reinvent a casual-gaming homepage, the redesign adopted a known tile + row pattern players already understood from the streaming and shopping products they used daily. Hierarchy: challenges first, then new content, then favorites, then details. The pattern did a lot of the wayfinding work for free.
The biggest pain point in research was that players could not tell what each tile represented. Tiles were rebuilt to scale with the grid, label the game prominently in large type, and place the game category directly underneath.
A card system was designed around six data points players consistently mentioned as important: time remaining (countdown), event type (weekly, daily, token, partner), game tile image, challenge description, player progression, and reward. Every element earned its place through research.
Players told research they rarely used the game detail page and only cared about currently available challenges and their progress on each. The redesign stripped the page to a hero, a challenge strip, simplified details with screenshots, and a small related-games block. Additional context sits in a "blade" drop-down pattern so the default view stays calm and deeper info is one tap away.
These pages were technically different surfaces but served the same job: surface more games to try. The redesign used one shared grid pattern across both, which both reduced design cost and kept the site legible as it scaled.
The old nav had 12+ items across three levels. Research quote: "Too many levels and too many links, I don't even use or know what most of this is." The redesign cut navigation to 5 primary items at 1 level.
The combined team (design lead from the studio, plus EA's researcher, frontend, backend, and three PMs) could not ship a full rebuild in one release. A phased launch was the right call so the site could grow with purpose over time instead of shipping broken or bloated.
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.