Pogo.com had been running for over two decades and had never had a structured design pass. The site showed it. EA Games brought me in to lead the redesign — five months, a full team, and a mandate to cut the bloat without losing the audience that had been loyal for 20 years.
Pogo.com had been EA Games' casual gaming flagship for over two decades — $30M in annual revenue, 50+ games, a loyal user base. It had also gone without a structured design pass for years, and it showed. EA brought me in to lead the redesign with a team of one researcher, front-end, back-end, and three PMs. Five months from discovery through detailed visual design handoff. The site launched globally.
The site audit made the scope visible immediately. Pogo had grown by accumulation — every new content type got a nav item, every new game got a tile, every new feature got a page. Two decades of additions with no corresponding subtractions. Each new technology generation (Flash, JavaScript, HTML5, mobile web) added a layer instead of replacing the last. The result was a site with no defined hierarchy, navigation users described as impenetrable, and game tiles so visually similar that players couldn't tell what was behind them.
The core issue wasn't any single broken feature. The site had optimized for adding content instead of for the people using it.
Twenty years of additions with no corresponding subtractions. The audit made the real problem visible before anyone touched a wireframe.
The user base was established and vocal. A survey of 3,400 active subscribers ran to validate past findings against current behavior, modeled on the Global Segmentation Study commissioned by EA's Customer Insights group. That ran in parallel with seven to ten video sessions focused on device usage, flows, and motivations.
The survey produced five clear persona segments. Curious Solver led at 56% — players motivated by memory, intellectual challenge, and learning. Steady Advancer (8%) was driven by accomplishment. Reward Seeker (8%) wanted real or in-game rewards. Imaginative Creator (7%) used Pogo to nurture characters and play roles. Passionate Belonger (7%) showed up for the community. The remaining segments fragmented across smaller motivations.
Primary persona: Martha White, 67, retired, Salt Lake City. Core motivation: keep her mind sharp and stay connected to a community she'd been part of for years. Core constraint: not as technology-savvy, on older devices, slow internet, fixed income. She had long since stopped navigating — she'd bookmarked her favorite game and skipped everything else.
Headline finding: challenges drove retention above everything else. If users couldn't surface the current challenge for their game within seconds, they left.
The full content audit showed a site structure that had metastasized over two decades. Sub-pages analytics showed almost no one visited. Navigation items pointing at content users had stopped engaging with years ago. The new IA reduced the footprint by more than half for the first release — not because content was being abandoned, but because shipping a leaner site faster gave the team real data to build phase two on instead of designing for every edge case at once.
Phased launch was explicit from the start. The team was small, resources were limited, and the alternative — a single large-bet release — carried more risk than the business could absorb. Ship the reduced footprint, watch real usage, then layer back the complexity that earned its return.
Martha's persona made the device picture clear: older laptops, mid-tier tablets, slow connections. The framework had to support every screen size her cohort actually used. Google Analytics confirmed the distribution and pinned the breakpoints. I based the responsive system on Google Material's grid: sixteen columns at desktop (1280–1600+), twelve at tablet landscape (800–1280), eight at tablet portrait, four at mobile (360–599). Same content model, same cards, no compromise per size — just a grid that knew when to collapse.
The top research finding on navigation was consistent across almost every participant: too many levels, too many links. Players had stopped using it. They bookmarked directly.
The redesign reduced navigation to the three flows that actually drove behavior: find a game, find a challenge, access your account. Every other nav item was either removed or surfaced from within the relevant context. No announcement was made about what was cut — users just stopped tripping over it.
The game tile system had two compounding failures: the images didn't communicate what type of game was behind them, and there was no challenge context visible before clicking. Users clicked blind, hit the wrong game, and left.
Research surfaced six data points players consistently named as essential: time remaining on a challenge, event type (daily, weekly, monthly), game type visible in the image, challenge description, player progression, and reward. Those six became the card system. Tiles got larger, consistently labeled, and grid-consistent across the entire catalog — one pattern that scaled from the home page to game categories to challenge central.
For game details that needed more space than the card could carry, the team adopted a blade — a drop-down panel that revealed game details in place rather than navigating to a sub-page nobody visited.
Six attributes, named unprompted across multiple sessions. The card system didn't design those — it just stopped hiding them.
The old home page was a flat content dump organized by what existed, not by what mattered. The redesign reordered around a priority hierarchy: current challenges first — the main reason users came back — then new content, favorites, then account details. The pattern was familiar from products users were already comfortable with: Netflix, Hulu, Amazon. Surface what the user is most likely to want right now, then layer depth behind it.
Game detail pages got the same treatment. Research showed users spent almost no time there. Analytics confirmed it. The redesign cut the page to the two things they actually used: current challenges and their progress. Hero, simplified game details, related games at the bottom. Everything else was removed or moved lower.
The page kept the same card vocabulary as the home page and challenge central — same component, different content. A challenge users had completed shows green and dims to half-opacity instead of disappearing, so progress remains legible. A reward call-out stays in rose to maintain the visual contract from the rest of the site.
| Type | Challenge | Progress | Time left | Reward |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DAILY | Win 3 hands without undo | ✓ 3 / 3 | 02:14:33 | +50 |
| DAILY | Score 1,200+ points in a single game | ✓ 1 / 1 | 02:14:33 | +50 |
| WEEKLY | Win 25 games this week | 14 / 25 | 4d 11h | +250 |
| MONTHLY | Reach 500,000 lifetime points | 243K / 500K | 21d | +1500 |
Players had bypassed the old challenge central entirely with bookmarks. The page was long, verbose, poorly organized, and structurally similar to the game categories page — yet the two used different UI patterns, which made navigating between them feel disconnected. The redesign used the same uniform grid for both. Same component, same density, different content.
Filters at the top let players narrow by event type. The grid stayed consistent regardless of how many cards filtered through. Post-launch, traffic to the page recovered as users discovered they could surface challenges they'd never have found from a bookmark.
$30M annual revenue. EA Games leadership reviewed the post-launch results and decided to grow an internal team and invest further in Pogo as a dedicated business unit. The phased approach held: a leaner first release built on real user data created the foundation for a second phase rather than a single large-bet redesign that assumed everything in advance.