Call of Duty websites:

Seasonal Updates, Redesigns & New developments

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 researcher creating A/B testing experie, generating surveys, and running UR, competitive analysis and tracking design quality metrics

Tools:

  • Figma

  • Miro

  • Adobe Suite

  • Squoosh

  • Jira

  • Monday.com

Overview

The Tasks:

Fill in for a designer on leave with the role of being the main designer to update the Call of Duty.com website with the latest seasonal content. I also contributed to redesign updates throughout the COD website.

I was asked to extend my contract from 3-months to 18-months to set a foundation for UR and User Testing for the Activision Lifecycle team.

The Result:

I introduced formal UR testing and research processes to the growing team, identified new engagement opportunities and defined A/B tests, user surveys, and UR studies.

accomplishments included but not Limited to:

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

In 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 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 pages: 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 Battle Pass 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.

Updating Homepage Assets

One of Many Individual Game Pages

Branding & Media

2. user research

A high-level goal for the team was to have more user research and insights to drive design decisions.

I was the website team’s point of contact with our Data Analysts, User Insights, & User Research teams before also founding a dedicated research team for the Lifecycle Marketing & Marketing Tech group.

Tasks included initiating conversations with tool vendors, introducing research to our processes, andbridging communications between neighboring teams, design, and PMs. I also planned, conducted & synthesized research studies for Quantitative and Qualitative insights.

Quantitative

Improvements made with data-backing included:

  • Updated with Activision account pages and flows for efficiency & clarity

  • Redesigned COD shop presentation to attract visitors

  • Mobile Download CTAs optimized for increased interactions

  • New internal Persona creations for out-of-game experiences

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

  • Content and navigation simplification for Activision’s 404 pages, homepage, branding, and editorial features

  • New tracking for design KPIs

  • And more…

Qualitative

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

Methodologies & Outputs I provided for insights:

  • Usability Studies

  • Competitive analyses

  • Heuristic evaluations

  • Exploration for new concepts

  • Synthesized survey results

Keeping Up with the Latest Changes for Competitor Websites

3. defining flows for reoccuring events

While learning the pattern for COD’s reoccurring releases among collaborating teams, I realized there was no prior documentation to help teams with understanding flow intention, iterations and error state scenarios for regular releases. One of these was our flow for releasing Beta codes.

I took the initiative to create documentation that could be used across all our franchises and with outside teams.

Documenting Code Redemption Flows

4. updating 404 page

One of our goals was to bring unity to all Activision franchise 404 pages as well as being more useful to the site users. These pages hadn’t been touched in years. I was tasked with freshening the 404 page for clarity, improved navigation, and flavor.

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

Previous 404 with Multiple Directory Options

Simplified 404 Page

Reddit Reactions to the New 404 Page

5. guides page redesign

The COD Website’s Guides page received some attention during a UR session and was an area we wanted to tackle as well. Testing showed that people were having difficulty finding some of the content they were looking for.

In order to simplify browsing and clear up confusing organization, 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

Old Guides Page Which Tested for Some Organizational Difficulty

Updated Guides Pages Per Game with Visuals and Updated Sections

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 and still in progress.

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