Madden NFL 20/21

Play calling is the most-used screen in Madden. Every snap on offense and defense starts there, so it's also the screen where a decade of added features shows the most wear.

The work began as Madden NFL 20 shipped in 2019. With next-generation consoles on the horizon, the gameplay team started looking past the annual cycle toward a Play Call system built for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. That system would ship with the next-gen release of Madden NFL 21 in December 2020, alongside Next Gen Player Movement. EA later framed the new play-call system as part of the "solid foundation for the player movement system."

I led the early design of the next-gen Play Call as the experience designer supporting gameplay. The other three experience designers on Madden covered Franchise mode and other areas of the game.

Starting that early meant designing for hardware and a player-movement system that were still taking shape, more than a year before release.

The brief had three parts: modernize the look and structure for next-gen consoles; shift play selection toward athletes, so a player could think "get the ball to my star receiver" instead of memorizing formation names; and bring the NFL's Next Gen Stats into the pre-snap experience, so players could see what a play would do before calling it.

Working with gameplay designers and producers, we turned that request into a design problem: what a new player needed from Play Call, what a competitive player needed, and where the existing screen was serving neither. The core tension was giving players more information (routes, personnel, concepts, stats) while making the screen feel simpler than before.

EA described the next-gen goal in nearly the same terms: a play-call screen that was "more intuitive and user-friendly, while still having the depth and power our core fans love."

We partnered with EA's user experience research team to put next-gen concepts and interactive prototypes in front of players, then fed what we learned back into the direction. Play Call is a muscle-memory screen, so the research mattered as much for what not to change as for what to change.

Early next-gen concepts put athlete-first selection, coach suggestions, and route previews together in a single, rebuilt layout. The challenge, as I first saw it, was arranging all of that cleanly enough that it wouldn't feel dense.

Play testing showed the problem wasn't arrangement. Two groups of players wanted opposite things. Newer players saw extra information as noise. They wanted to pick a play and get back to the game. Experienced players wanted depth, but they navigated the screen by habit. They weren't reading it. Their hands already knew where to go, so any concept that moved things around to make room for new information slowed down the people who used the screen most.

That changed the direction. Instead of rebuilding the screen around new information, the next-gen system would add new ways in around the familiar path. Starting from the athlete gave newer players a simpler way in, without asking them to learn formation names first. Formation-first browsing stayed where experienced players expected it, so their habits still worked on day one. Saving favorite plays gave competitive players faster access to the calls they already knew they wanted.

The real issue wasn't layout. It was two audiences, and the answer was more paths into the playbook, not a denser screen.

The gameplay UX team took the work through production for the December 4, 2020 next-gen release. The shipped next-gen Play Call included star-driven play calling, which EA described as making play calling "more customizable and intuitive for players to get the ball in the hands of their favorite players, while also learning the rationale behind each play."

Players could call plays by player, picking a play by the athlete they wanted to feature instead of flipping through formations. Favorite plays were saved with a marker to a new playbook tab for quick access. X-Factor and Game Goals moved inside Play Call, so players could see Superstar abilities and in-game stats without leaving the screen.