About EA & My Role
Electronic Arts (EA) doesn't really an introduction. I was working on the FIFA Mobile team as an Assistant Producer. Producers at EA are actually game designers who also hold production responsibilities of collaborating with different teams to ensure the content goes live. This includes working with artists to create all the assets, engineers to get all the features working, and QA engineers to test and minimize bugs before release. It was a valuable experience that gave me the confidence to pick up any new skill and work with different teams! There is a lot to say, but I’ll focus on the UX aspects here.
Our team didn’t have a full-time UX designer at the time. I was appointed as a UX champion, along with 2 others on the Arts team, to advocate for UX during the game design process and carry out UX initiatives.
Note: I cannot show any work behind the scenes or talk about any sensible information that may impact the company. But I will do my best to give an insight into my journey and discuss everything I’ve learned!
Team
3 UX champions
My Role
User research
Design process improvement
Collaborate with UX research
Improving the Game Design Process
For our first task, our team leads came to us and stated some problems they would like us to address:
They believed there is room to improve in our game in terms of the user experience, and wanted us to give more UX feedback during the game design process.
As a part of this initiative, we should implement the necessary changes into our design process.
Like most gaming companies, the environment is very fast-paced and everybody is handling a significant workload, so the changes should be incremental and have minimal impact the game designers.
FIFA Mobile was an on-going game where we shipped new content every 2-3 weeks. In order to incorporate more UX feedback and create a stronger presence, we needed to first look at our current game design process and see where it made the most sense. Our process had the following steps:
With this process, UX feedback came near the end when changes were more difficult to make and did not have enough emphasis. Logically, we wanted UX feedback to be earlier in the process and more intentional. And we felt that the most effective method would be:
The game designer should meet with the UX champions for feedback when the design is ready to be presented in step 2. This way, there was more room for change and UX was considered as the game content was being designed.
The original UX meeting could be turned into a less intensive meeting for a final review on changes.
This change would require slightly more work from the game content owner and the UX champions because of the added meeting, but we believe it’s justifiable for our goal. The updated process would looked like the following:
After implementing the new process for 2 months, we saw clear UX improvements in our content! We held a meeting with all game designers and identified a couple areas for further improvement:
Prioritize aspects that make the biggest impact.
Quickly go to game design manager to resolve conflict between UX and game design.
Increase shared knowledge between UX champions and game designers to speed up collaboration.
The team hoped to continue to expand on the UX processes incrementally, and make it a more integral and dynamic part of the game design process.
Tailoring the Style Guide for Game Designers
Another project that we took on was to increase consistency and improve user experience by creating an updated style guide for game designers and artists. As we began to work on it, we realized that a conventional style guide, where the spatial relationship between the boundaries of the components is shown, was not very useful for game designers when they were implementing game content.
With the tools available at the time, game designers had to manually input coordinates for each component. And the coordinates referenced to a specific point within the component. This made it difficult and time-consuming for them to follow a conventional style guide precisely, as they would have to manually calculate the coordinates and perform some trial and error.
To solve this problem, we decided to create a coordinates-focused version of the style guide for game designers. This style guide translated all the spacing relationships into coordinate relationships, allowing producers to quickly determine what the coordinates should be when implementing game content.
The game designers' initial reaction to this style guide was very positive. But it was still being tested and developed by the time I left the company. We hoped that it could be further improved and incorporated in the future.
Collaborating With UX Research
When we wanted to develop bigger features that require more rigorous UX research and testing, we would reach out to EA’s User Experience Research (UXR) team. And in this situation, the UX champions would act as the bridge between the production team and the UXR team. We did so by:
Making sure that the game design team's request had clear, measurable objectives, aligned with the goals of our game, and could be executed in a timely manner.
Summarizing the findings and presented them to the team in a concise and actionable manner.
Key Learnings
Always consider the cost and benefit of every decision from a business and a team-function standpoint. This is especially important in an extremely fast-paced environment like EA.
Similarly, it is important to understand what aspects of your product affect the user experience more.
A good user experience has to take into account a user's expectations formed from previous experiences (or previous iterations in a franchise). A design that is better for new users isn't always better existing users.