FIFA Mobile

Evaluating FIFA Mobile's onboarding for EA

FIFA Mobile is a football video game developed by Electronic Arts Canada for mobile devices, featuring over 17,000 football players across 700 clubs in 30 leagues. In-game currency can be used to train and unlock players — earned through gameplay or micro-transactions.

A three-tiered study approach

10 Canadian male participants were recruited, aged 18–25, with interest in football, prior FIFA experience on console or PC, and no prior FIFA Mobile experience. As per Jakob Nielsen, 10 participants were sufficient to capture a diverse range of player feelings and identify trends.

Three core insights

Player affect journey maps

Two journey maps trace how players' emotions shifted across the onboarding — revealing exactly where frustration peaked and confidence dropped.

Learnability vs. currency comprehension

Participants had moderately-high confidence in gameplay mechanics — high learnability. But currencies only used during the tutorial were ranked as most important, revealing a significant gap in currency education.

Five redesign proposals

1. Condense the onboarding structure

Consolidate shooting + passing into one stage and dribble + defend into another, reducing the initial perception of a time-consuming onboarding without disrupting experienced FIFA players' familiarity.

2. Provoking player exploration

A consistent visual interaction cue was adopted to highlight areas of free-roam exploration on the main menu — Quests, World Tour, and Events — to encourage players to freely discover in-game content and facilitate autonomy sooner. The before and after below show how the main menu experience changes with the cue applied.

3. Reducing player errors

Participants skipped many dialogue boxes during onboarding and became prone to making errors that compounded their frustration. Adding small animated gesture cues and making dialogue objective boxes reopenable lets players course-correct on their own — reducing support dependency and improving learnability.

4. Improve knowledge about currency

Use informational pop-ups or headers within reward screens and the store to inform players about currency benefits, promoting discoverability and future likelihood of microtransactional purchasing.

5. Increase player conversion rate

Tailor the Welcome Bundle to use currencies familiar to FIFA console players (FIFA Points & Coins) or introduced during onboarding — ensuring relevance to the player's conceptual model.

Validated by EA's own research team

We received positive client commendation from EA's User Experience Design Director and UX Designers on our presentation. They confirmed our findings were quite similar to their internal User Research team's findings — a strong validation of our methodology. Constructive feedback included adding sample questionnaire questions and more statistical backing when storytelling.

A dream project, lessons in scope

This was one of my favourite projects because I have always dreamed of working in the games industry. I learned a lot about conducting a user research study from scratch: determining client needs, forming design evaluation goals, and building a self-directed study methodology. Conducting the study remotely during the pandemic and managing a constrained 3-week timeline pushed our team to research best practices on remote testing and constantly reprioritize to deliver the core deliverables successfully.