The problem
Play calling is the most-used screen in Madden. Every snap on offense and defense starts there, which means it is also the screen where a decade of accumulated features shows the most wear. Going into the Madden 21 cycle, with next-generation consoles arriving in late 2020, the gameplay team was asked to modernize it.
I kicked off that redesign as an experience designer supporting gameplay.
The brief had three parts. Modernize the look and structure. Shift play selection toward athletes, so a player picking a play could think "get the ball to my star receiver" instead of memorizing formation names. And integrate the NFL's Next Gen Stats, which the game was adopting for player movement, into the pre-snap experience, including real-time route previews so you could see what a play would do before you called it.
I worked with gameplay designers and producers to turn that modernization 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.
The constraints
The research
I partnered with EA's user experience research team to put concepts and prototypes into play testing, 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.
How it evolved
Early concepts, wireframes, and interactive prototypes explored how athlete-first selection, coach suggestions, and route previews could coexist on one screen without adding density.
In parallel, I contributed to Madden's shared design system in Adobe XD: components, interaction patterns, and documentation that let four experience designers across different areas of the game work from the same parts. Play call was one of the first features to draw on and stress test that system.
What I did
Athletes over formations. The shipped system is built around "star-driven" play calling: surfacing plays by which player they feature, so selection maps to how fans actually think about football.
Two densities, not one compromise. Madden 21 ships with a Slim view that focuses purely on picking a play and an Enhanced view that adds personnel and football concepts. That split resolves the new-player versus competitive-player tension without forcing one screen to serve both badly.
Multiple ways in. Coach Suggestions, Formation, Concept, Play Type, Personnel, and Recent Plays are all available as ways to browse, plus the ability to save favorite plays. The structure lets each player build their own path through the playbook.
See the play before you call it. Route previews driven by Next Gen Stats data turned play call from a text-and-diagram menu into something closer to the on-field view, and helped players learn the rationale behind a play instead of guessing.
- Decision 1 of 4Framed the modernization request as a design problem with gameplay designers and producers
- Decision 2 of 4Explored athlete-first selection, coach suggestions, and route previews through concepts and prototypes
- Decision 3 of 4Play tested with EA's UXR team and fed findings back into the direction
- Decision 4 of 4Contributed components and patterns to the shared Madden design system in Adobe XD
The outcome
At a glance
- Xbox X & PS5
- Platforms
- 17M+
- The Yard Games through Day 7
- +45% vs M20
- Games played, WK1
The redesigned Play Call system shipped with Madden NFL 21 on next-generation consoles on December 4, 2020, as one of the headline next-gen features alongside Next Gen Stats player movement. I kicked off the work and carried it through concept, prototyping, and play testing; the gameplay UX team took it through production and ship.
The design system work outlived any single feature. Shared XD components and documented patterns are the kind of infrastructure that lets a small design team keep a franchise consistent across annual releases.
What it taught me
- 01The most-used screen is the hardest to change. Players had years of muscle memory in play call. Research with UXR kept the redesign from breaking habits it didn't need to break.
- 02Add information by adding structure, not density. Slim and Enhanced, plus multiple browse paths, let the screen carry more without feeling heavier.
- 03Design systems earn their keep on hard features. Building play call while building the component library meant the system was tested against a real problem, not a hypothetical one.