UX Design
My Role: UX & Copywriter
Identify a core business problem within a brand and design a digital solution.
EB Games
Digital distribution platforms and E-commerce sites have decreased EB Games’ market-share of new game sales, and reduced the demand of physical media traditionally leveraged by EB Games through used game purchases and trade-ins.
A multiplatform subscription rental service designed for existing EB Games customers, to increase the accessibility and affordability of gaming purchases by reducing the financial commitment of game and console purchases and providing flexible service options.
One problem we encountered was that a large portion of EB Games customers are children or young adults who do not have access to their own money but instead use their parents’. Our subscription rental service requires credit card information and ongoing payments so we had to figure out a way for children/young adults to have their own accounts to use the service without giving them full financial control.
To solve this, we created joint accounts for users who were not paying for their accounts with the customers who were paying. Financial settings would be available on the financier's (usually a parent/guardian) account, while the renting abilities were available to the user (usually the child). The parent’s account allowed them full control over pausing account services and current rentals, while the child’s account was unable to incur extra charges (for more rentals or peripheral rentals) without permission from the parent account.
This ensures that the child has freedom to utilize the service but that the parent can always see what the child is renting and if it is appropriate and are able to quickly pause the service/payments and dismiss or approve extra charges.
The existing aesthetic of EB Games website and other gaming sites followed similar rules with little change between them. This aesthetic offers nothing to the experience of browsing games, so we were challenged to offer a different approach while still achieving EB Games’ brand image.
When approaching this problem, as a group, we tried to ideate based on the existing realm of gamers and to take solutions from concepts gamers would recognize and understand. This brought us to the idea of controlling movement and from that we found our underlying concept that would shape how our interface worked and looked.
This concept allowed us to have easy navigation between pages, and shaped the diamond layout and theme for the rest of the interface design. Taking the concept of controlling and navigating from gaming allowed us to introduce something familiar to our users in an innovative way.
