Adventure Awaits

88% of players rely on social communities vs 12% who interact with official EA channels.

Current EA Players are trusting external social platforms more than official EA channels as their primary source of information to support their issues, problems, and guidances.

Here's what I did as an Experience Design Intern.

I designed an AI experience that displays personalized help information and actionable navigation to the users across EA Help Pages

Timeline:

May 2025 - Aug 2025

Role:

Experience Design Intern

Team & Stakeholders

Product Managers, Experience Designers, Player Researchers, Service Designers, Design Technologists,

Team Organization Initiative

Fan Growth Team is responsible for creating accessible care services for thousands of active EA Players from troubleshooting, account management, and forums.

Overview:

Over the span of 12 weeks, I  designed an AI-driven community experience on EA Help from hosting ideation workshops, creating product requirements and user research guidelines, to presenting my project to the larger Fan Growth for product buy-in across the larger Care-Everywhere initaitve.

AI Overviews of EA Articles and EA Community

Generating personalized help and summaries from EA article and the EA Community

Ask Follow-Up Questions

Continue prompting the overview if the player has more specific questions about their help

Explain This & Show Related Help

Reveal more non-intuitive information about the player's help information if they require more explanations and source help

Discovery

It started with understanding the current problem at EA

88%

of players rely on social communities

12%

of players interact on official EA channels

Forming initial thoughts, curiosity, and connections to EA Help

Several questions came up that all illustrate a larger objective

How can we connect the right information to the right problems?
How can AI be used to help gather, synthesize, or show this information
How much will players interact with this feature?

Design Objective

How do we design an AI experience that displays personalized help information and actionable navigation to users across EA Help pages?

Pinpointing potential starting points

It started with looking at Ingress Points

Ingress points helped me identify possible entry points from players to help.
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From even a quick google search of an EA Game question, we can see that community solutions onEA forums and other social platforms appeared as their primary search results.

Revising task flow to integrate AI for player help experiences

Here's an example of an earlier ideation to the current user flow

I created a revised task flow to help understand how AI can create a seamless experience between EA Help and EA Forums

Synthesis

How are current AI tools being used in this space?

We collected so many rich anecdotal data capturing experiences of real people. Diversity and inclusion needs to be highlighted throughout our platform. So, we need to synthesize our findings into a cohesive focus and have a framework for our platform.

These are the themes that we found in the user research.

Researching competitive approaches to recognize how AI is used across various help experiences

I conducted competitive analysis of AI tools from AI pioneers, social channels, and entertainment spaces

This revealed methods of content personalization, community help resources, and dynamic discovery

Key Insight #1

EA Help can rely on context-specific search, retrieval, synthesis, and organization to curate personalized help for players

Key Insight #2

EA Should stray away from static support pages and incorporate real-time EA Official and community solutions

Key Insight #3

Transparency, Accountability, & Fairness are pillars that safeguard trust between EA and playersi n the presence of AI

Live Ideation Workshop

These were challenging and ambiguous insights, so I hosted an ideation workshop with my amazing team

From Categorization to Prioritization

I led an ideation workshop with my design team to generate potential approaches to surface AI tools across the EA Help ecosystem

After categorizing the most popular votes on ideas, I used the Rice framework to prioritize design decisions based on the reach, impact, confidence, and effort (RICE).

Ideate

How do I bring these concepts to life?

Identifying how the AI experience can help retrieve and deliver help solutions across game articles

Let's picture how a Sims 4 Player would search for help in the gardening guide

As a player, I want to read AI-Summary Overviews so that I can avoid reading long articles to get my solution quickly.

For reference, this is how much the player seens within the first screen. It's even longer on mobile experiences

Iterated through presenting design decisions and processes with my design team

I began with low fidelity exploration on AI summaries and community repsonses

Through feedback and constant iteration, I was able to refine high fidelity screens to be validated by usability tests.

Mapping Pain Points for Next Iteration

Unmoderated Usability Tests & Next Steps

Transcribing key participant responses across the user journey of the designs

I tested the final designs through an unmoderated usability test with 8 participants from the ages 23-48

There were a lot of insights, so I transcripted important insights onto a journey map of different tasks

01. Refine the Follow-Up

Capture the player's curiosity intent, rather than showing only static information of the article

I ended up changing a lot of the colors since they were not accessible at all. I used the contrast checker to help create these changes.

02. Reduce Click Economy

Enhance the click economy of revealing more non-intuitive information

Currently, it would take 3 clicks to "Explain This" or show "Related Help"

03. Consider alternative starting points

Consider alternative starting points where the AI Follow-Up Logic can exist for more ambiguous use cases

This could look like showing dynamically changing content from the EA Community that is related to their game support page.

Final Designs

By the end of the internship, I was able to create an AI-Driven Community Experience on EA Help

AI Overviews of EA Articles and EA Community

Generating personalized help and summaries from EA article and the EA Community

Ask Follow-Up Questions

Continue prompting the overview if the player has more specific questions about their help

Discover Communities

Players now have more accessible ways to discover communities that they can join to make friends or share common interests.

Reflections

Eternally grateful for all the wonderful experiences at EA, especially with the other interns

Outside of my internship role, I was also the "squad leader" where I organized intern socials and events at the EA Redwood Shores office. I had so much fun being apart of a community that is curious and driven in the video games space, and I am grateful to be a part of EA's Summer Internship 2025 with others.

p.s Ask me how I organized events at EA :)

Content

Project Introduction

Discovery

Synthesis

Live Ideation Workshop

Ideate

Usability Test

Final Designs

Next Steps

Back

Contact

codydmak@gmail.com

Connect

www.linkedin.com/in/cody-mak/

@2025 Cody Mak