User Experience Designer Video Games

Anyone working in the field of UX has likely read their fair share of articles proclaiming "UX is not UI!" or "UX is UI!" and anything in-between. You ask a UX Designer to describe what we do and our eyes glaze over slightly as we put one hand thoughtfully on our chin and proclaim, in a profound tone, "Everything". I promise you the several hundred people working on any large product disagree. As a concept though, it is a different story. Don Norman, the most huggable of UX grandfathers, said it best.

We can all agree that UX Designers do not, in fact, do everything. But what then is our role in these large productions? To get there, I want to start by looking at some of the realities of everyday life working at a large games studio.

The Spoils of AAA

The games industry is quite a unique beast. Few mediums are as deep and complex as the interactive entertainment that games offer. The amount of time and resources spent on AAA development is, as we know, quite impressive. It often occupies the time of hundreds of people for several years.

I am lucky enough to have in the studio a User Research team with modern test-labs (including one-way mirrors straight out of your average Hollywood interrogation scene) and the possibility to take in large amounts of users to continually evaluate our work; providing me and the rest of the development team with tons of valuable feedback both qualitative and quantitative. This means that as a UX Designer I do not need to conduct much actual testing myself; the feedback & data is readily available for me and other members of the team to use in informing decisions as long as we know what to ask for.

In the same spirit, I am also lucky that we have a very talented marketing and analytics team that sits on a wealth of knowledge about who our users are and how they interact with our products over time. This mean that as a UX Designer I do not need to spend time creating tools like personas or collecting data about what type of products our users are looking for.

Now, it should be said that this varies greatly from one place to another. All studios have their own way of doing things and they will most likely all differ in some way. There are studios out there that likely took the journey I am describing years ago, while others are still only starting to move towards it.

As studios grow large and projects more complex, we create the need for more specialists. Roles that would be handled by a single person on a small team gets broken up into more teams and specific areas of responsibility. It is the only way such large projects can deliver the expected quality. This is nothing new; organizations have worked this way for a long time. We have people in the DICE studio that will spend an entire project obsessing over how a weapon or soldier sounds, perfecting that audio for different environments and situations (some of the most insanely talented people I have ever met). The same thing is happening to the UX Design role, a role that traditionally covers a wider area of responsibility.

So what can we as a UX Designers working with AAA games, or really any large project involving lots of people from many different disciplines, focus our energy on in order to contribute the most to the end result?

Becoming the Standard-Bearer

While it is true that all developers should care (and most do, passionately) about how users experience their products and while UX principles should ideally be an integral part of every game designers toolbox, the reality is that many developers at times find themselves too focused on a specific problem or feature to be able to look at how their work impacts the larger picture.

This is not to say that some designers are not knowledgeable in the importance of good usability. But when the reality of a large production starts to hit, the distance between understanding a concept and applying it in practice can be quite big. We are all humans in the end, and multitasking is not our strongest talent.

Become the Standard-Bearer for good usability— Everyone will agree with you that good UX is important, but what it actually means to get there is not always as clear. There are periods during any project where I will spend my days only walking between desks discussing issues with producers, designers or other stakeholders. A feature or system might have proven difficult for users to understand, and different solutions are on the table from different perspectives. Is the correct solution adding more info to the HUD in order to better explain the feature? Or are changes needed to the underlying design in order to not overwhelm the user? These discussions often do not have simple solutions, but applying UX methods to identify the usability problems that causes frustration can help create the best possible experience. It is a constantly ongoing process that is often frustrating, but keep these discussions constructive and you will see the team around you grow a more mature understanding of what UX means and how everyone can apply it to their work.

One important thing to keep in mind in all of this: Sometimes the best possible UX solution is not always the best solution for the game as a whole. Maybe adding more 2D iconography to explain AI behavior instead of improving the animation of the characters is not the best solution from your perspective, but it might be the most cost- or time effective. And as professional designers we need to be mindful of these aspects at all times.

Help users on their journey — It is, arguably and somewhat paradoxically, often harder to get time and resources invested towards onboarding mechanics in a $60 boxed AAA product over a free-to-play title. This comes down to the fact that free-to-play titles need to get users engaged much earlier in order to get them committed to the product, whereas users that already sunk a certain amount of money into a game from the beginning will tolerate more friction and frustration before they decide to move on.

This doesn't mean that onboarding mechanics are unimportant, quite the contrary. As a UX Designer you can help shape the user's journey through the game by looking at how different systems interact with each other and how the user will perceive them as a whole. What motivates someone to engage with a particular feature? What type of information and experience are they looking for when exploring a certain aspect of the game? All these things are important to answer in design, and they become especially important when someone is learning how to interact with a brand new experience.

Consider, for example, how you can utilize design practices such as progressive disclosure to introduce users to a large amount of features in a way that does not scare them away by creating cognitive overload or choice paralysis. But be prepared; in any large production you will come across stakeholders that believe strongly that their particular system is critically important and needs to be prominently displayed to the user. It is very rare that only one of these arguments exist at any given moment.

Remove misconceptions — Whenever your work impacts someone else's, you will inevitably come across several misconceptions to what UX really means. Sometimes these are spoken out loud, other times they sit in the minds of people but still impact the way they approach your work. The largest of these is by far the notion that UX will distort the artistic or design intent. Designers or artists will fear that applying UX practices will "over-simplify" the experience. This is of course not the case as Usability at its core is about identifying unwanted friction and removing it. Games are unique in the sense that friction is often a core part of the experience whether it comes from conflict, tension or difficulty. We just have to be mindful about where that friction fits. Should the challenge be beating that really tricky boss fight? Or should it be about figuring out how to change the controls?

There is not always a straightforward solution when these misconceptions come up, but the best you can do is to present the challenges that users are facing by sitting down together with designers or artist to look at feedback and figure out solutions together by leaning on the combined strength of game design, art and solid usability practices. Celia Hodent over at Epic Games has written a great post on the subject, covering both this and other popular misconceptions you will come across.

These are some examples of how you can work as a UX Designer in big projects, but I'm sure if you ask someone else you would get other answers as well. The reality is that the responsibilities of the role just differs that much from place to place, and even during the time span of a single project.

Are we a dying breed?

I think it is really important to question the value any role adds, and exploring how that value is best applied is key to the success of any project. Our role as UX Designers in the production of a large AAA game might differ significantly from that of a small digital agency for example, and I think it will become increasingly important to make that distinction clear as we look for new talent with UX knowledge to join our industry.

What about the future then? It is fun to speculate, but hard to predict. Maybe there will come a day when people working specifically with UX Design in games are completely redundant just from the fact that everyone is working with UX. Maybe the role "UX Designer" will disappear completely in favor of more generalist job descriptions such as "Game Designer". But looking at where the industry stands today, we have a long road ahead before we get there.

Is it a goal to strive for though? I am not sure getting rid of "specialists" in these large projects is the best solution. A better goal could be to educate more people on what is today considered specialist knowledge, so that we do not end up relying so heavily on these roles as the one true source of information. The solution might lie earlier in the career of new game developers. More and more developers are now joining the industry from schools specifically tailored towards designing games. Introducing subjects like usability and exploring Cognitive Science earlier as a core way of approaching design problems, more than just a part of designing great interfaces, could better prepare designers for a career in games where strong user experiences will grow ever more important.

For now, using the tools we have, I hope UX Designers will continue to contribute in the best way possible to teams building the amazing experiences that only video games can provide.