What the F-UX is UX?

[Music] thank you hello everybody um I am here to Welcome All of You awesome GD seers my fellow GDC ux goblins and um I am here to talk about the elephant in the room right what the is ux right okay so uh you know who am I to tell you this who the f am I right why why am I why are you here to hear me talk right so my name is Samus wolf I am the senior ux researcher at the ablegamers charity um which by the way at the end of this slideshow I'll have a code word for you and if you go to our website which is also at the end of this slideshow you can enter your name to win some super cool swag so keep your eye out for that

um I'm also a mentor at springboard I'm a feral ux engineer you can see me out in the wild doing ux things um I have a master's degree in user experience design and I have over seven years of ux job experience specifically I'm a druid I'm an Android animal Wrangler I'm a horse girl which is a gender neutral term as far as I'm concerned and what how a ux unicorn right the mythical the magical so I don't really advertise myself as like professionally a ux unicorn which is kind of cringe to begin with but also because I don't really resonate with being a unicorn either and the reason of this is the state of the ux job market so to be frank ux job market it sucks it's just kind of a mess right so um being a unicorn or what really you are is an experienced generalist is not

the flex that people think it is and it's a huge cause of burnout in the industry which I'm gonna kind of touch on so I'm going to talk a little bit about my journey right so prior to ablegamers I started as a graphic specialist I moved into web development I moved into being a ux professional then I became a full stack developer and finally a ux engineer so I worked in uxed in a lot of non-gaming related Industries I did fintech I did banking I did industrial stuff I worked for non-profits you get the picture lots of different things as you can see definitely not on the Skyrim map right okay because of my background in web development and then you and then full stack development eventually visual design and also ux I was very successful in my roles you know I could do everything right so I worked on a lot of projects end end and here's the thing uh this is my toxic

trait I loved it I loved doing that I loved being at the beginning with ideation and at the end with development and release I absolutely had the time of my freaking life okay so besides being passionate about gaming I had no experience in the gaming industry I came into the gaming industry freshly out of being a designer and developer for an industrial Enterprise setting so besides being passionate about gaming and you know improving that end user experience um when I started interviewing for roles in studios the hardest part of that for me was proving that I was a good fit for the field and that I could understand gaming industry specific challenges and also solve them right so the job market as I've listed here there's a couple of things that I'm going to sort of touch on and discuss with you guys so being a unicorn or an

advanced or experienced generalist it opens a lot of doors um I know the process from beginning to end like I said I've done the ideation the research the idea pitching the wireframing the magic the design sorcery all of that stuff you know I was Project managing all of these projects as well as you can imagine that was a lot it was super fun I loved it but the pros did not outweigh the cons and in the end the Khan snuck up on me like Solid Snake he was there um I burned out real bad I became stressed finally had a reason to stress eat you know like you're just like yeah that mac and cheese five boxes it's fun um I really just couldn't do it anymore um I decided that I wanted to focus on one roll one ux role I was just like just pick one take your hand out of all the cookie jars pick one roll and I've been a super happy researcher since loving my work with the Apple Gamers

charity so here's the thing the job market is riddled with ux generalist positions they're all looking for unicorns and these are masquerading as different things so even positions that are meant to focus on a single roll they end up having attributes and are misdirected or bloated with conflicting attributes of other parts of ux and companies just don't know how to hire a ux professional or look for a ux professional um so it falls on us to figure out like where our next gig is and how to translate the job description into something that makes sense so what is a ux professional you might ask yourself well wait I've only heard of ux designers or product designers what is the other stuff you're talking about Samus you're crazy so there's a ton of names right arose By Any Other Name is just smell sweet or

whatever the Romeo and Juliet says um there's all these titles and even more it's kind of a lot it's kind of overwhelming don't really know what to do with all these all these names right sometimes you just look at them and disassociate for hours at least that's what I do um so here's the thing I Define ux professionalism with three things okay and this is something I talk to my mentees about quite often one is kind of the objective thing you know it's a you're a professional who incorporates or manages feedback directly or indirectly into the product life cycle two you're an empathetic human being who cares deeply about the end user of your product however the most important point is number three someone who has the desire to use technology for good this I I tell every single one of my students the minute they meet me as their Mentor that this is the most important thing because there's a ton about the industry

that really gets caught up in this in this mess of chaotic stuff in the beginning and we really don't talk about how important it is to use technology for good and how that's a huge part of ux right so people who want to break in the gaming industry it's hard to do that with all this competition right so ux folks here's the thing we don't necessarily have the same experience in our background as other people in the gaming industry for example software development project management illustration and design all of that stuff that makes up other parts of gaming Studios there's a lot more direct formal education paths than ux like don't get me wrong I have a master's degree in user experience design and I absolutely loved my program I would recommend a master's degree to anyone but also I understand that it's kind of a rare thing now there's a ton of ux professionals out there who have formal Education and Training who have been

around for a long time but usually what happens is to learn about ux you are in an adjacent industry and then you hear from your brothers girlfriends dog groomers best friend that ux exists right so it's kind of something that you stumble upon rather than you hear about in high school so here's the thing and I bring up the nielsenorman group because as we all do as uxers love the Nielsen Norman group they have this awesome chart of how many ux professionals just ux professionals the whole thing there are in the world so we're in the 2020 range or at least I think we are times the soup um and so like Nielsen Norman says that there's about maybe a million ux Professionals in the world right now okay sounds like a big number right you know you're just kind of like that's a lot Samus what are you talking about there's we don't need any more ux people um here's the thing software engineers I believe that ux is kind of a

one-to-one with software engineering in the USA alone there's almost four and a half million that's a lot and in the world there's almost 27 million where's all the ux people guys come on where are we at so now we all love personas right we're all jazzed we're all going to be doing some job hunting we got a Persona they're ready to go this is where I'm gonna have you guys come in I'm gonna ask y'all some questions and hopefully we're gonna get the ball rolling on some job hunting so let's describe our Persona right okay they're motivated by pivoting from their current industry they're not happy with their current industry they're just like we want I want to leave they want to work for a game Studio because they like games they want to they need to find the right position for them right because there's a ton and it's kind of a soup out there they want to understand the ux industry better because they are pivoting their pain points are the vagueness of the industry and the rejections as we have

all had from the gaming industry because they don't have experience that's painful all right and then there's the other stuff okay so they're female she's a scientist she's always caffeinated she's goth yeah it's Abby um so uh Abby has decided that being a forensic scientist is super cool in everything but she has all of these talents in interviewing and computer science and analyzing human behavior and just really sexy ux traits right so Abby's decided that NTS is dumb and boring and she's gonna leave um she's ready to get away from the Navy which she does in 2018 so this is fine she's had she has a career Gap it's okay though um and she is wanting to become a ux researcher for the video game industry she plays MMO she plays first person shooters she thinks of herself as a well-qualified person to become an

expert in the gaming user experience division so Abby's scrolling through indeed as we all do you know in bed that's Doom scrolling for me at least sometimes um so don't do them scroll Tick Tock Doom scroll indeed and uh she comes across a few job listings that she's interested in um here's the thing Abby wants to work primarily as a researcher that's where she feels she shines so while she can do the enhance unlike the picture that has two pixels and like design and photoshopping and she can do hacking and coding what is what can't she do really let's just be honest um she she doesn't want that to be the main part of her role like it's fine if it's a part of it but she wants to primarily do research and she also wants to be involved directly with users and analyzing their behavior because she thinks that's just super freaking cool so here are the companies that the jobs we're going to be looking at have come

from job number one it's called ux researcher she probably liked it because it's called ux researcher right so I'm going to ask you guys on this job description what do you guys think is red flag and Shout It Out three years of experience okay well okay okay thank you yes anybody else yeah okay yeah okay anyone else Masters preferred yeah okay so um big Games Inc is a AAA Studio creating strategic FPS games and the franchise's big battles and bang bang shoot shoot um they they're looking for someone with a whole lot of things huh you know um

three years of experience I literally I'm gonna be honest I'm sorry recruiters out there I tell all of my students to ignore that I'm just like nah we're we're not even gonna look at that that's not a real number bye so so um and I'll talk about why later but um additionally somebody mentioned ux portfolio what does that mean like so this is a researcher position so case studies do you want case studies do you do you want prototypes what if I don't have prototypes what do you want that's really vague and that kind of makes me nervous that they don't know what a ux researcher does um somebody said manage agile efforts why is a researcher doing that they should not be doing that and the thing is while these job listings are fake all of the attributes of these job listings have come from real ones so um master's degree preferred I in research I've seen this and you know I get it but at the same time when it's an

entry level position a little goofy in my opinion so basically Abby looks at this and she's just like nah nah we ain't we ain't doing that so now everybody what do you think about this job position red flags anyone yeah okay all right anybody else what was that product design specialist yes anyone else yeah okay anyone else all right so um the first big red flag here is understanding of css3 HTML5 and JavaScript I mean why so as and and I can tell you as a um in

in my like current state of being I have no idea but a lot of like even outside of gaming I've seen a lot of like ux roles be described as like please have these you know coding things like know how to code and I'm like for what what am I doing what am I coding why no um so that's a red flag for me like I'm just like nah I I don't want to be doing coding Abby doesn't want to do code she wants to do research and potentially some design so that's a no um the next thing is um somebody mentioned attend research projects like in theory okay but also what does that mean like end to end of the Project Life Cycle in its you know entirety or like are we doing the research projecting the methodologies synthesizing the data like what does that mean and then Additionally the title product design specialist this is a real title you guys I found this in

the wild what is that like I'm just I like looked at it for like five whole minutes and like sipped my definitely alcoholic drink at the time and I said that that isn't real like you know don't get me wrong I like having cool titles I made a really cool title for myself when I was in my undergrad I think it was uh interactive and learning teaching design Specialist or something it was absolutely wild but you know I was like 20 then this is I doubt that the person who made that title is 20. so all right Abby's like nah this is too much and please next one okay so she's getting a little desperate now she's looking into the adjacent rules um ux UI designer okay by we make games LLC so this is a smaller company they have a bunch of different projects from roguelikes to racing to card games to mobile titles right okay what are the red flags here

everybody's just like why The Code by the way I definitely copied and pasted that directly from a job um yeah so okay code what else yeah yeah that's that's a lot of things to be doing right okay anybody else no we don't need that in user experience don't didn't she get the memo um what about what about everybody else come on yeah yeah you don't want to Champion new ideas to the scary bigwigs that give you the money you don't want to be in charge of that as a ux UI designer how dare all right what was that the next best thing that one I love because I've seen that in a few job descriptions and I'm just like what does that mean like what am I in charge of like solving world hunger like what please don't put that on me

um so Abby's looking at this and Abby's like wow this is really intense like what on God's green earth am I gonna do if I even get an interview with this company because they're scary so um and I would say the same you know like I wouldn't apply to this this sounds like it's 10 jobs rolled into one that's way too much work job number four okay this is our last job um I'm not saying there's not red flags but what do you guys think would potentially be the problems here strong attention to detail that is real vague like we don't we anybody else yeah yeah I was man you know maybe you're sitting in the same room and looking at it huh anybody else yep development life cycle okay okay anyone else

yeah that that is kind of weird it sounds like this recruiter didn't really know what they were looking for right you know this kind of sounds like they Googled ux designer and they just kind of copied some stuff off of Google all right yeah we can definitely like see that and it makes sense because indie girl games is a small startup they don't know what they're looking for really they want to produce really awesome romance Sims and this is definitely not influenced by my uh favorite genre of game and they want to have new and original stories that anyone can enjoy so they're a startup they're baby they don't know what they want but this job matches Abby the closest for her not only her interests but her skills and we're going to kind of talk about that so here's the thing the next part of this after you identify the job that you're like vibing with right you have

to sell yourself we as ux professionals have to advocate for ourselves we have a lot of skills people who were in adjacent Industries and then they find interesting in ux the thing about that is we we do have a lot of skills that translate and I think a lot of people get caught up with the fact that it's not like a one-to-one exactly so guess what guys self-validation it's very important um this took me many many years to uh hone and you know it's not as I'm not perfect at it either I need to think about it sometimes and when I feel that imposter syndrome creeping up I need to sit down and sort of count my blessings and remember that you know like I am good at what I do um and Abby is empathetic there are many episodes that she's shown carrying deeply for her team members she wants to you know she wants to get the people who are innocent out she wants to find the bad guys she has a lot of passion for

you know humans which again what's number three somebody who wants to use tech for good right so she has a lot of experience like she she's very talented and skilled as an individual and a lot of this is on other Tech sectors so now what we need to do when we're formulating our resumes is we need to put this through a lens of ux put our experience through the lens of what a user experienced professional would do and then also relate it to how you would approach the gaming industry right we need to show those strengths we need to make them shine so this is her first resume so I would say and actually you know what take a look at this what do you think Abby could do to make it better and it's okay if you don't know we can I I can tell you

Mark and seis okay grammar mistakes yeah okay that's me um I also I also do tell all of my students to use grammarly which I clearly did not do despite having a grammarly business account it's fine don't worry about it but yes you're right not to be too cynical but if she did she make sure to take this from the job posting because whoa that's newfangled technology there friends but uh and not in this one no she didn't so yeah the bullet points aren't goal oriented you know like that's important

as well yes you oh both of you you first and then you IO doesn't show a lot of interest in ux yep right yeah you know putting the focus on that right I do about the Phoenix oh no we're Recruiters in here oh okay right yes that is really scary is yeah it's kind of intimidating right several Pro yeah I know it's it's a flex

yeah yeah that's a good point yeah yep I would say so too all right so um in interest of time because Abby does redo her resume even though this resume is super impressive right it has nothing to do with the ux position which we brought up hey maybe you should talk about like what's in the job experience itself so Abby revises her bio a little bit she talks about having expertise in various research methodologies instead of ballistics instead of all that stuff she talks about software development it's a lot vager now and also compiling and synthesizing highly sensitive research results we took out the ballistics thing because that is super scary and um we kind of put in like okay interviewing and questioning you know

worked alongside it develop departments as a full stack Dev maybe that's a bit too much information but it also lends credibility to you know she knows these things and she's proud of knowing these things and she understands how to talk to Developers um created Graphics animations and designs for internal and external procedures she elevated her certificate in ux design above her bachelor's and she also revised her skills to be more understanding of the job position itself so all of this right what does it mean what does this mean if you're here at GDC you want to help make the gaming community and Industry a better place so regardless of the title that you have the impact lies in the actions that you perform if you are okay with having the title of ux designer if the job includes generalism and encompasses the life cycle of a product that's fine but maybe

and maybe that UI ux job is primarily UI with a little ux sprinkled in and you think that's great it's not about like I'm not saying don't do these jobs don't pick the jobs that have weird titles and you know like have generalism in them it's all about what you want to do but you just want to be informed and you want to understand okay like what am I going to ask in that interview what am I going to ask the team if I get past the recruiter phone call you know like um am I going to ask about my role or like how relevant you know HTML and css3 is for a researcher why is it in the position listing you know all those things so I'm hoping that I've equipped you a little bit with a another perspective on job hunting in the ux world and the key takeaways believing your experience tell your story create empathy all of this should sound familiar if you're a ux person um show that you want to be a part of

the crowd using tech for good and don't give up that's the biggest thing don't give up you will find a job out there you will you just have to you have to look for the perfect position you have to really sell yourself and you have to want to use tech for good so thanks my code word is Metroid I bet you didn't see that coming and uh there's all the URLs for our adjacent services at um the uh ablegamers charity I am again the senior ux researcher so please take a look at those go to gdc2023 for to enter the code to win a swag bag um feel free to email me for whatever you know gossip I'm here for that and um follow me on Twitter and find me on LinkedIn thank you guys so much and I know that we have three minutes for questions so I'll take like two also fill out your evaluation forms but be

really nice because I'm fragile Not Fragile no I'm not from I'm not French or Italian whatever that is anyways yeah so um I will also be in the hallway after this but I'll take like a quick question if anybody has one wow everybody's leaving I'm sorry [Music] all right yes this is true very very true well thank you so much you guys again I'll be in the hallway if you guys want to chat with me and um have a good GBC [Applause] thank you