Working as a UX Director

As a UX Director in the UX Team, I do a few different things. First, and perhaps most importantly, I work with our user researchers or directly with the users to understand the problems that the users are trying to solve. Often, users are not given a chance to give feedback, or they are not even aware that the issues that they are dealing with are actual problems to be solved. Second, I design solutions to those problems, either by creating wireframes and discussing them with the teams or by developing the interface myself in collaboration with the programmers. Finally, I do a lot of communication, internally and externally. I give UX training internally, speak at conferences to share my knowledge and network with like-minded colleagues, and I also do a lot of documenting and sharing of UX best practices that relate to game development tools.

I am fortunate to work with a great group of people, the UX Team. Some focus on user research, some – like myself – focus mostly on design, some focus on evaluating how people use the tools. I’d say that the biggest challenge that we face is that our process is new to the tools development process in the games industry, so we’re still working with some teams to figure out how we can best collaborate. The challenge of integrating the UX process into an existing and established industry is nothing new outside of the games industry. UX teams around the world have faced similar challenges, but with persistence, most are successful in integrating themselves, and I’m confident that we will do the same.

Interface Basics

There are many different things that you need to balance when designing a user interface. Two of those are “learnability” and “efficiency”. For example, if you have only icons for the buttons in your interface, you can save space, and the user can see more of their work. However, only having icons makes the software difficult to learn at first. On the flip-side, if you have icons plus text, and a tutorial for every button when you click on it, you make it easier for the user to learn, but you slow them down, and the addition of text means that there is less space in the window to look at their work, meaning that they need to zoom in / out and pan around a lot to see everything.

Maya Peculiarities

Maya is a software geared towards professionals who work with it for many, many hours per day. With a software like Maya – or Photoshop, for that matter – it is assumed that there will be a learning curve. However, the reward for that learning curve is an interface that “gets out of the way” so you can see as much of your work as possible. To me, a typical sign that a piece of software is made to be more efficient is that that interface is very small, and the work area is very large.