I was brought on to this project very quickly and flew to Redwood Shores for an intense three-day planning session with the client at which myself , a Creative Director, and the client developed the nucleus of the idea that would generate the new EASports.com site.  We developed a framework that woudl support not only the core site experience, but the various levels of microsite necessary for each of the upcoming EA Sports titles.

 

At the time the brand was heavily fractured as each title had a different team and many lesser titles did not have a positive online experience associated with them.  We wanted to bring up all the games without tearing down the larger titles.

 

Note: The entire project - EASports.com - Title Framework - Example Site - was completed in only 2 months.

One of the key challenges for the main site was navigation.  Titles are available on specific platforms and different users like to search for titles via different channels.  Using knowledge from past projects I created a 'Game Finder' in the header that replaced the traditional menu system.  This wold also allow EA to promote specific titles based on audience.

 

The second major difference from the previous version of the site was that overall visually we expanded the use of images and based on a creative direction gave the site a more magazine-style feel.  This improved the recognition of the games and provided greater branding opportunities.

This was a modular and scaleable approach to providing all titles with a bare minimum experience that could be progressivly enhanced.  The framework also carried forward the overall change to a more image-centered design.  Because the concept was relatively unkown at the time, I created an initial page to help describe the framework.

After laying the groundwork I showed each module in-place on the page to better help stakeholders understand how everything fit togeter.  This was an additional amount of work over just describing each module independantly but really increased the understanding by the stakeholders and helped sell the concept.

Similar to the Mississauga project years before: Widgets were designed in different sizes to fit different configurations.  Today we would make these widgets adaptive/responsive, but mobile was not a consideration at this point.