EA Origin Platform
Designer in a small product team
2012-2013
A cross-platform vision for gamers. In 2012, Origin was primarily a commerce platform for purchasing EA games. The Origin team envisioned one holistic gamer engagement platform, where users can play, chat with friends, connect with other gamers, earn rewards, and discover new games. When I joined EA in 2012, I took part of a design team with 3 other designers, working within a small product organization to bring this vision to life.
VISION
EA titles span across game consoles, PC, mobile, and web, with an audience of both core and casual gamers. Origin wanted to drive more engagement towards EA games, build up a community, and provide richer and more social experiences for users to enjoy. Data from the first phases of this work indicated that the more socially engaged gamers are on Origin, the more likely they would convert into a paying customer and engage in another game. The Origin experience would be embedded into EA games through an in-game UI, as well as delivered through stand-alone iOS/Android apps. When I started on this work, our team primarily focused on designing for mobile games.
PROCESS
Origin existed in various forms across platforms, and one of the first challenges was working with various IA’s and different product offerings per platform. Starting with mobile, I created a simple IA to house the basic features of the Origin experience, and worked with other designers to create user experience flows. I designed majority of the features, including login, discovery strip, games, friends, news feed, and rewards. Given the small size of our team, we moved from whiteboard to wireframes, mocks, user testing, and UI documentation fairly quickly. I worked closely with product managers, as well as developers outside our team on a sprint schedule.
OUTCOME
After a year’s journey, we launched the first phase of Origin mobile, delivering some of the basic user experiences such as login, cross-game promotions, and adding friends. It was exciting to be part of a nimble team building new features from the ground up, however working with many vastly different games and across platforms proved to be difficult for a small team. This became evident when I was creating the rewards system: calibrating the value of in-game items across games based on a common redemption currency was quite a challenge. This was my first time designing for mobile, so the experience gave me a good foundation as I moved onto more mobile projects in the future.