Overview

Contributions: Systems Design, Seasonal Content Design, UI/UX Design, Tools

Welcome Center is the front page of Forza Motorsport. Each week when players launch the game, the first thing they see after the splash screen is the Welcome Center. This screen helps keep players informed of what is going on each week and helps players get into events effortlessly.

Design Goals

• Seasonal Content Visibility - Highlight seasonal content / events happening across the game

• Deep-linking Functionality - Provide players with easy access to quickly jump into seasonal events with minimal button presses

• Dynamic Content / Layout - Ensure the layout doesn’t grow stale, upsell DLC content if Players don’t already own it.

Feature Design

I led the design documentation effort for Welcome Center, which outlined the intended behavior of the menu, as well as the design tools that we would need to ultimately author and update the menu regularly and in an automated fashion.

This scene in particular required several key components, including tile scheduling, deeplinking support, and prioritization to determine which content to show at what time and how to prioritize between multiple sets of content based on a number of factors.

UI/UX Design

Tile Scheduling / Cycling

As with many elements in Forza Motorsport, due to the limited time nature of many different events and challenges, we needed to be able to schedule tiles in the Welcome Center to start and end on certain dates, often in conjunction with other limited time events / challenges. We were able to configure a global date/time system on the back-end that allowed us to reference a single date time across multiple game areas, including Welcome Center.

Tile Prioritization

Welcome Center tiles were prioritized based on several factors -

1. Schedule

2. Index Value

3. Conditionals

Tiles would appear to players when it was in an active date/time range, when there was no tile in the same column with a lower index value, and depending on whether there were any conditionals applied to the tiles. This enabled us to have a tile that deep-linked to our in-game store and took the player straight to a new Store item that they didn’t already own. Conversely, a player who already owned that item in the Store would be shown a completely different tile, due to conditionals placed on those tiles, that stated that if a player already owned the DLC, we should show them the next highest priority (index) tile that is currently active in the schedule.

To account for we also had permanent ‘backup’ tiles in place, in case, for any reason there were no tiles currently active within a column.

Seasonal Content Authoring

For seasonal content, my role mainly consisted of design direction & implementation of all text & imagery, as provided by other teams. I also configured all of the deeplinks, which ensured that when players selected a specific tile, it took them to the correct event or area of the game.

Naturally this area of the game required a great deal of collaboration with the Community and Marketing teams to ensure that our messaging in-game and across social channels was in alignment.

This is also where we had upsells for any DLC content, which dynamically displayed depending on whether or not players owned the content already. This meant that Welcome Center had to be designed and implemented in a manner that considered all possible player scenarios.