The hubs created for each year's Game of the Year awards were unique, causing an increase in code and experiences that weren't scalable as well as an uptick in QAÂ upkeep with increasingly diminished value over time.
Production of content and imagery became more and more cumbersome over time as the rules and boundaries for content to fit into the hubs changed year over year thanks to a lack of consistency and uniformity.
Though the content can change from event to event, a recurring pattern was found that like items could be grouped together very often with there rarely being a singular, unique piece that didn't connect with others.
Because of this, design and engineering could reliably depend on grouped layouts and modules while the content team could focus on how to organize the content they intended to publish for the event.
A unique challenge to the events is that the content wasn't all published at the same time nor were groups of content published in lockstep.
The focus changes over time in the event as well. Category awards like Best Xbox Games could be the focus over a group of days and runners-up for Game of the Year could be more important a few days later.
Using the Phoenix UX patterns, the pages used grids of grouped content to focus on what's most important. As content became less timely or valuable for users to see, the groups were converted to carousels to condense their footprint on the page.
The content team was able to organize groups of content in the CMS so that the most important pieces could publish and display higher up on the page without the help of design or engineering. Images created using the new standards easily fit in the grids and carousels as well.
