The 6 game UX roles

hello I'm Graham and we're gonna talk about user experience so this track is about engagement and monetization and retention those sorts of things that I'm sure you want for your game and of course user experiences as a vital component to that but it's also a component that's been somehow it's become nothing and everything at the same time what is user experience just a quick show of hands would anyone say they work and user experience or that's a part of your job but be shy to admit it ok quite a few actually ok so was trying to understand the different types user experience and why this is so important to you is at some point as a studio you need to hire someone who is doing the UX job the user experience job

but it turns out they come in different flavors and the read the rationale behind this talk was because some studios were hiring the wrong people they thought they were getting something but they got something else I'm not quite surprised them they said oh but I thought user experience did whatever they thought so that's the rationale behind the talk is to help developers understand well you want to make successful games and yes user experience is important to you but it comes in different flavors and you need to do which ok so my role out of interest I'm a UX researcher or a user researcher and by the end of the talk you hopefully you'll know what that means or I've done a really bad job so we'll see I also got very confused they even confused myself the title of this talk originally said the 7u actuals and I argued with myself no no no there's only six and then they argued a bit more no no no it's really 5 I left it at 6 by the end of the talk really I think there's - sorry - sorry to spoil it you know but when you talk

about that later so a quick history of both game development on UX games start off food started off arguably with a very simple interface I was going to say no interface but of course that's not true text is indeed an interface it's text textual interfaces are completely fine so that's where we started from and games with Zork anyone plays or Carney order text-based adventures oh wow ok showing your age perhaps we'll see or retro fans so then after that we had the early 8-bit days where we had things like the mighty Horace go skiing on your right hand side whoa who showed ID for Horace go skiing I can't believe that okay so I've been a bit unfair to Horace go skiing because I've actually said the dev team who made it was programmers basically I'm insinuating this is programmer art but for all I know what they heard the UK's best artist to do Horace or indeed the trees of the skiing but I'm taking a guess at saying they didn't I'm gonna guess it's saying the

programmer probably did it so how these early games that did not need big teams because the display is available and what was needed could have been done by one person the programmer move up a little bit 16-bit days resolutions got a bit higher available memory got a bit bit better which means the things we were trying to put on screen could more closely resemble the objects from real-life graphics got higher fidelity during this stage we did start to see specialist artists in UI roles you had two programmers could no longer represent the things they wanted to represent in a way that people would enjoy that say some could that's but some couldn't moving up again the early 3d days the PSX the PlayStation one those sorts of era 3d modeling became important what we're saying is rules are getting more diverse more people are needed to make these games that's fast-forward a little bit new devices came along not just not just on graphics and higher fidelity but new

ways of interacting with a game so not just the UI but also the interaction how you control that device they also changed fast forward more recently SAS ins Creed it's alleged that ten Ubisoft Studios went into making at Assassin's Creed unity I believe around a thousand developers thousand developers that's excluding marketing or anything or publishing anything else that was involved that's a very large development team so over this development from the early spectrum days or the 8-bit days all the way to today more specific rules have emerged and one of those roles is UX but it's still not well understood there are many UX rules used in unity and we're going to talk about the different styles and different types so if we're gonna get closer to describe UX let's talk about maybe what it is not let's maybe start there these are three

very similar games you will probably recognize the one in the top left which is clash of clans and then there are many many many many clones that I could have chosen I say clones and that's not necessarily a bad thing by the way I'm just saying that they appear similar and they have similar features but even if someone were to make a clash of clans game and copy the s the assets pixel for pixel and if they copied the features it is still possible for those games to have a different user experience in other words they feel different even though they look the same and they offer the same features how those features are implemented can completely change the feel of the game the behavior and that's much closer to the user experience it's about how you feel so it is possible to allegedly clone a game as close as you think but you could make that game worse or you can make it better so this is what we're trying to mean by user

experience but let's take a step back again the very origins of user experience actually came from fields called human factors or economics this is way before computers so what we're saying is anybody who had to interact with a machine or operate in an environment if you wanted to make that environment see if and pleasurable to use then an ergonomist or someone with a human factors background that was their job to understand so predominantly the background of psychologists they understood how people use their environment more recently that field may be called human-computer interaction so if you're talking specifically about digital interfaces there's the job of the human-computer interaction specialist to say I understand why people work with digital displays and all the early work at Xerox PARC and things like that the star the early mark all that sort of thing they were done by people who worked in human-computer interaction but it's not enough because what those guys were really interested in at the very beginning of the field was about usability in other words can the person

do what I want them to do and even in the web and if you're a web developer usability is more common than UX even though they say UX that's a long discussion I know but what they're really interested is can you do the thing you want to do can you buy the book can you book the flight can't you book the hotel can you do that in a way that you expect without error that's the field of usability and that's what these guys came from but that doesn't quite cut it for video games just because you can do it does not mean that you enjoy it right so let's look at that additional field to see why it's so important to game development today before we move on this is anyone who's done any design lessons this is the very most basic lesson and design of anything the top left you understand people what do you want to do you move across to design ok people want to do this here's hybrid design the thing for that person you move down to implementation ok we'll make the thing we evaluate the

thing that we build it right if we did not build it right we go back and redesign it based on the evidence we can round as many times as necessary until we do get it right and then we ship it any design textbook will have this diagram or some variation of this diagram in it somewhere and you'll cover it in the first let first-year undergraduate skill and design from industrial design to computer design to game design it doesn't matter you've probably seen something like this so those early guys the human factor psychologists or human-computer interaction what they were concerned with with these three main areas their job was to understand people what do you want to do they would then help the designer are you designing it correctly based on what information that people can understand they wouldn't do the implementation they would very much heavily focus on the evaluation did you do it right so that was their job fair enough we all understand that but this is usability we're still not getting to user experience but we're nearly there so what we're saying is used UX is

somehow linked to usability this is the guy who made the term UX so dawn Norman is one half of the Nielsen Norman group so you don't normal a psychologist and you Jakob Nielsen a computer scientist a Danish computer scientist and together they formed a group that do usability in user experience and this is his definition I'll just read aside briefly I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were too narrow I wanted to cover all aspects of the person's experience with the system blah-blah-blah-blah-blah including all these things this is the most important part since then the term is spread widely so much so that it's starting to lose its meaning that's the whole point of this talk people are saying I do UX the truth is they they're probably not doing UX bits of it could be true but it's not what he was talking about so this is the guy who made the term saying yeah I coined that term but honestly it's nice so widely used that it's lost

its meaning so this is an attempt to bring it back and also to help you as game developers you have to hire someone and find someone in your studio and you need to find the right person but if this term is so wide and compass thing then how do you know what you're looking for so we'll go through six types very very quickly of the different types of person you could potentially hire the first one is the origins of field they're called user researcher or UX research that's the background that I have my job is to answer why why does someone like your game why do they not understand your game why did they leave anything to do is retention engagement all those sorts of why questions that's what a user researcher does why would you need them well they understand people to understand the structure of interfaces not painting it we'll come to that later on there SAS gameplay how did you feel them playing that game what were the barriers in the way all that sort of stuff brief types of background from the people in SUNY or Microsoft or even asura be soft they typically have a

masters or PhD either in human-computer interaction or human factor psychology that's the most common type of background so if someone says are you actually searcher that's what you should expect from that role so here's our graph we're building up UX so far what we find one of them is user research and throwing the right hand side these are sort of skills you would expect what's next an information architect perhaps slightly less common more common the web actually but if you're making a game that's kind of heavily heavily menu driven and lots of textual information and lots of potential graphical heavy I guess in terms of menu structure then an information architect is maybe what you need what do they do well they're concerned with the structure of information and findability I need to find this menu option why is it over there why on earth did they put it there it makes no sense right that's because no one from information architecture background helped you structure your menus their background typically at least in the web world

would come from information science or library science and gaming it's not really a specific role I have to say but I have seen it mentioned in job ads so I had to cover it this is the sort of thing they do so if you're gamers lots of management that's what different areas the information architect will help me structure that information based on people so they don't make it up it's not manufactured they go and interview people or follow people in their job role to see what they do and then they structure this in a way that makes complete sense so that when you use the system or use the gamma goes of course it's there where else would it be Desert Storm I don't from World of Tanks but it could come from any game where there's lots of menus and it's quite quite a lot of information so up the two areas and I'm running out of time so I better speed up the third one is UX designer very common indeed an oddly enough there her job is design the user experience that is completely different from game design they work with the game designer but they're meant to take all the information somehow prototype and mock it up so that they could hand out

information to the the programmer you'll see examples in a second so they're meant to understand people but that could have come from a user researcher they often work independently they mock-up what the screens may look like and then how that follow that to the programmer their backgrounds kind of mixed I've met people here furniture designers who do user experience and all sorts of weird jobs but the furniture designs a weird job I should retract that immediately it's probably fine job what I'm saying is it's not a background that you may expect these are sorts of things they do you're poisoning this sort of stuff before so here's what our screens might look like the idea why you need them is because you want to cap make your mistakes on paper before you give it to the programmer or the visual artist because that's really expensive if you can catch an issue here that's much better it's important to say that you're meant to test these things with real people if your well will come without at the end come in so without our third roll on the number for an interaction designer interactions about the interface I'm gonna go very

quickly because I've got a video to show you which explains it much better you've probably all seen the film Minority Report where Tom Cruise tries to use this futuristic system this was done by an interaction designer so their job is to come up with new interfaces and their jobs especially true whenever new systems come out like Kinect and things like that their jobs to imagine what a new system interact like by the way and most things in the movies those interfaces do not work they're mocked up they're just for show in this case that's not true this is a genuine system built by Jeff Hahn as companies called perceptive pixel apparently this is a working system it has not mocked up or Hollywood veneer if you like this is the real deal you get the idea you've seen it before I'm sure so this is the realm of the interaction designer I'm running out of time so I have to go very quickly the last ones UX developer their job mostly concerned with programming so taking that those details and implementing implementing them so make it work basically and finally we have the UI

artist so the UI artist or visual treatment is the person who paints the screen if you like they make this happen but they're not necessarily to do with the structure of the information of where it is or give the copying their job is on the visual presentation so whenever I scour UX jobs all these six six different types have come up but they're used interchangeably that says I am out of time I mean I'm into the questions area so although there are six types I can boil it down to four quite easily because things like development UX development maybe your programmer could do that and if I was being a bit harsh I could pull it on the three types of leader help you the most you probably need it for your studio you may need a user researcher help you understand gimmes a UX designer to help you do the mock-ups to present to the programmer and then you need someone maybe a visual artist but there was common role which is not necessarily true as that of UI UX and this is the one that some people

have tried to actually say stop saying UI UX it doesn't make any sense there's even a website called UX is not UI it's become such a problem this is what UI does in the right-hand side effectively and on the left is what UX and they're just trying to say as developers what do you want do you want someone to paint the screen and DUI or do you want someone to help you understand your game and the structure the information it is true that some UI people will do elements of UX but they're quote from the NN group the people he met invented this term and they said if you're not involving users then that's not UX that's called design and there's nothing wrong with that that's fine but just call it what it is I'm done I'm getting bad looks we have to go you