Electronic Arts

role

User Experience Intern

team

Characters Team - Central Technology

skills & tools

Figma, Design Systems

duration

4 months

(May - Aug 2026)

overview

A new internal tool needed game teams to adopt it, but it had no way to tell one team's work apart from another's.

I worked on the Characters team inside EA's Central Technology org, building tools that help character artists and animators create character heads faster across EA's games, think Battlefield, Apex Legends, and FC. One of our newer tools automated part of the facial blendshape process, and we were trying to get more game teams to start using it.

The tool had no concept of a project or a workspace. Every team's jobs lived in the same running list, with no way to work privately or tell one team's jobs apart from another's.

Adopting the tool meant sharing a space that wasn't really built to be shared yet.

problem

The job status board was one long list, and nobody could tell whose work was whose.

Every job, from every team, showed up in the same running list. There was no concept of a team or a project, so artists had to scroll past jobs that weren't theirs just to find their own, with no idea who any of those other jobs actually belonged to.

Even getting access to the tool was unclear. The request lived in one vague line in the app, with no explanation of what to do next.

New teams hit two obstacles before they got to use the tool. They didn't know how to request access, and once they were in, they had no way to tell their own jobs apart from everyone else's.

process

I started by looking at how other tools handle switching between spaces, then built the pieces this one was still missing.

Before sketching anything, I looked at how tools people already knew, like Slack and Notion, handled moving between different workspaces. I wanted whatever I designed to feel familiar instead of like a brand new pattern someone had to learn.

This tool was new enough that it didn't have a real UI kit yet, so before I could design the actual workspace selector, I had to build the pieces it would be made of. I took the lead on expanding the component library myself: project cards, a team dropdown, and a set of team icons and colors, mostly pulled from Tailwind's palette, so every game team could be told apart at a glance.

The ask was a workspace selector. What it actually needed first was a foundation this tool didn't have yet.

While I was working on the selector, I noticed the onboarding flow itself was part of the problem. There was no real path for a new team to request access, and no explanation of what they'd landed in once they were let in. That wasn't technically the ask, but I designed that flow too: a way to request access through Slack, and a welcome screen that actually explains what a project space is.

the solution

A workspace selector that felt like something artists had already used before.

The final design let any artist switch between their team's project spaces in a couple of clicks: a dropdown showing every project they had access to, a color and icon specific to their team, and a clear path to request a new one if they needed it. The same patterns carried into the job status board itself, so jobs could finally be filtered and scoped to a team instead of sitting in one shared list.

Once teams could tell their jobs apart, a tool built for one team started to feel like it could actually belong to many.

reflections

Good UX doesn't have to be complicated to matter.

The design itself was relatively simple, but it was a necessary one. Prioritizing UX was still a relatively new idea on this team, and building something that made the tool easier to trust and adopt helped make the case for why it mattered beyond this one project.

Getting to advocate for UX on a team where it was still a new concept, and watching that argument actually land, was its own kind of win.

Also, I've been gaming for as long as I can remember, so getting to work at a game company and learn how character creation actually happens, while also growing as a UX designer, was such a great experience :)