Call of Duty websites:

Seasonal Updates & Redesign

Company: Activision

My Role: Contract UX Designer/Researcher

Duration: 18 months

Contributions:

  • Updating seasonal content on website for all Call of Duty games

  • Wireframes, Redesigns on Previous Formats, Flows, Prototypes across various Activision franchise websites

  • Documentation of Personas, current and planned site flows and information architecture

  • Primary designer creating A/B testing, generating surveys, and running UR, competitive analysis and tracking design quality metrics

Tools:

  • Figma

  • Miro

  • Adobe Suite

  • Squoosh

  • Jira

  • Monday.com

Overview

The Tasks:

I was brought on as a contractor to fill in for a designer on a 3-month lead, being the main designer to update the Call of Duty.com website with the latest seasonal content. When time permitted, I also contributed to redesign updates to various parts of the COD website.

Once the designer returned and with 3-month remaining in my contract and a company restructuring had occurred, I was then asked to be the main designer to own UR and user testing for the COD site along with any non-game Activision digital design projects.

The Result:

I was able to introduce formal UR testing and research process to the growing team, identified new engagement opportunities and became the main designer defining A/B tests, user surveys, and UR studies.

accomplishment included:

1. Seasonal Updates

2. User Research

3. Defining Flows For Reoccurring Event

4. Updating 404 page

5. Guides Page Redesign

6. Future Product Planning

  1. Seasonal updates

During my first 3 months, I updated various COD Website pages for each seasonal update with the latest key art, feature info, and copy for 2024’s Season 3. I also and verified that designs were meeting quality expectations (visuals, copy, behavior, usability).

Content that was updated for each season included:

  • COD Home page images and copy: usually highlighting the most current main game or teasers for COD Black Ops 6 release

  • Game page: Modern Warfare III, Warzone, Call of Duty Mobile, Warzone Mobile, and the newly releasing Black Ops 6

  • BlackCell page: Images and info on the game’s seasonal battlepass items

  • Editorial pages: Guides, PatchNotes hero images and seasonal tag colors

  • Branding page: Downloadables for creatives

Using Photoshop and Figma, I made minor adjustments and tweaks to supplied hero images and key art to fit across Wide Desktop, Regular Desktop, Tablet, and Mobile devices.

Image Coming Soon

Image Coming Soon

2. user research

Bringing more user research and insight was a major want from our group’s director. I was the website team’s point of contact with our Data Analysts, User Insights, and User Research teams before also founding a dedicated research team for the Lifecycle Marketing and Marketing Tech group.

Quantitative

During my time, we used data to make improvements to:

  • the COD account sign in, store presentation, and mobile downloads

  • internal Persona creation for out-of-game experiences

  • clarity of terminology and in-game features, discoverability on the site, and ease of use for website features

  • simplification of Activision’s 404 pages, homepage, branding, and editorial pages

Qualitative

Before joining the website team, there hadn’t been any formal qualitative UR testing or research processes.

Being able to provide usability feedback before releases and quality checks on different parts of the site allowed us to consider updates that would help us reach out goal of appealing to newer players as well as our experienced players.

Image Coming Soon

3. defining flows for reoccuring events

As I began to understand some of the reoccurring releases for COD, it became apparent that some of these regular releases didn’t have thoroughly documented flows to help with intension, iteration and error state scenarios. One of these was our flow for releasing Beta codes.

To help with making our own internal flows easier for these repeated process, I created documentation that could be used across all our franchises and with outside teams.

The more we could organize ourselves and share this knowledge, the better we could support making Beta code distribution a smooth and exciting process for the players. This included better messaging and thoughtout flows for errors and limitations.

Image Coming Soon

4. updating 404 page

One of the webpages that hadn’t received attention for many years was the 404 page and I was tasked with freshening this page.

Along with the COD Website 404 page, our goal was also to bring unity to all of Activision’s franchise pages as well as being more useful to the site users.

I worked with our data analysts and conducted a competitive analysis to understand how our people were landing on our 404 pages, where people would navigate from there, what were the current 404 trends.

These lead to deciding on simplifying the page options, bring more franchise personality, and remove the social media links on this page to be used elsewhere.

To lead these changes:

  • I worked with our editorial team to come up with franchise-specific copy that were playful and thematic for encoutering challenges

  • I teamed up with 2 other designers to make updates across each franchise’s visuals presentation, copy, and CTA changes

  • I met with Data Analytics to talk about A/B testing opportunities that would further improve the user experience of finding the page they wanted

Image Coming Soon

Image Coming Soon

5. guides page redesign

The COD Website’s Guides page received some attention during a User Research session and was an area our Editorial team wanted to tackle as well. Testing showed that users were having some difficulty finding some of the content they wanted in the old format.

In order to simplify browsing and clear up confusion with labeling, I worked on creating a more visual update to the Guides Pages.

What changed?

  • Guides were separated by game and additionally with a toggle between Mulitplayer Guides and Zombies guides for clarity

  • Images were added for each displayed guide to appeal to wider audiences and give more context

  • Introductory and Basics guides had their own section to help newer players feel less overwhelmed

  • Modes were separated into their own category with matching icons for each mode type for identity

  • Maps could now be filtered per map type and season within each game

Image Coming Soon

Image Coming Soon

Future Product Planning

While I was brought in to help with the website redesign, the team had grown during my time there and with that, the scope of our project space. I was moved into a more fully dedicated research role, which included some work on areas that were kept more closely under wraps.

For NDA purposes, I cannot show these but can hopefully provide examples of the outcomes of this research in the future.