NCAA Football 14

The main menu component for NCAA Football 14 utilized large tiles as navigational elements. The menu needed to be dynamic and feel highly interactive so I designed an interaction model that allowed for certain tiles and groupings of options to move independent of other groupings. This allowed us to keep primary navigational elements on screen while changing secondary information and ultimately gave the interface a kind of choose-your-own-adventure feel.

In the first mock above a user would initially only see three options on screen: Continue, New, and What's New. When the user selects the New option, the Continue and What's New options would become disabled and the New Coach/Existing Coach/Play Games Only sub-options would then animate in to reveal a different menu path.

The second mock above is an example of another usage for this interaction concept: Pop-In options. Typically in EA Sports games sub options are presented in a boring pop-up, contextually out of place with the remaining content on screen. The pop-ins allowed us to place options on screen at the same x/y location the user has just interacted. This leads to an easier experience as the user does not need to change his interactive model between contexts. In the mock above the user would have selected a "Quit" option, which then would transition to a confirmation pop-in.

NCAA Football is at it's heart one of the deepest RPG games around. 130+ schools, multiple conferences, 70+ players on a roster, each with their own attributes for 100 different skills. For NCAA 14 the team decided to add a new element to the RPG - Coach Skills Tree.

Upon entering the screen the user could select from 4 different trees to spend points: Recruiting, Game Management, Offense, and Defense. Once a tree was selected, I didn't want the user to have to be taken to an entirely new screen, so instead I devised a system where the selected item would expand to show additional content (second image above). This allowed the user to quickly jump in and out of different skill trees and spend points as he desired while saving time by not forcing the him to traverse multiple screen flows.

The power of this design came from it's ability to hold a LOT of different data, while also allowing the user to customize HOW she wanted to digest that data. Functionality is as follows:

The list on the left of the screen is always present, containing whatever the primary data points are. In the case of recruiting, that was the list of recruits themselves, as well a few important stats for each recruit.
On the right side is a set of N cards that can contain specific, categorized information as child data of the selected item on the left side. By tapping LB/L1 and RB/R1 the user can then shift through the data subsets for her recruit. So one page may contain all the recruit's attributes, another the top school choices of that recruit, another the scheduled visits, and yet another for the pitches used to sway that recruit to sign with the user's school.
Through my own research and paper playtests it became evident that different users (surprise surprise!) valued different types of information as they navigated the feature. By allowing the user to select different cards of data on the left that would "stick" while navigating the right-side list, a user could quickly customize the feature to see the data most relevant to her style of play.