Creating space for UX in game development
Understanding the pipeline & UX’s place in it.
Being the first and only UX Designer at a AAA mobile game studio created some challenges in figuring out where my skillset & expertise could make the most impact in a process that has made games without a UX designer for over a decade.
In a typical software development pipeline, UX or product designers are responsible for much of the product’s feature designs & flows; in game development, game designers have very different skill sets and take on a myriad of unique responsibilities to meet the increased complexity and scope of designing monetizable fun. UI artists, often from a separate art department, work with game designers to refine & visualize the game’s interactions & interfaces.
While every game studio has its own unique team composition, many have not historically had a separate space in the design & art relationship for a dedicated UX specialist.
When I was brought on as the first dedicated UX designer at the studio, I felt totally out of my element in the design department working alongside game, economy & narrative designers, and really separated from the UI artists, the other half of the UI/UX coin. I had to learn each role’s responsibilities to understand where UX needs weren’t being met and how I might be able to bring something useful to the existing pipeline while production was already moving forward on a brand new game.
Gaps & Overlaps 🧱
I quickly learned that game designers had far too many responsibilities on their plates — from level, character & combat design to very technical game data entry and documentation — to have the time to carefully craft each feature’s wireframes & flows to be the best possible experience. Low fidelity mockups were passed onto UI artists who often reworked the layouts, information hierarchy & flow architecture, while also being expected to create pixel-perfect interface assets that far exceed typical software UI needs — think juicy, volumetric & highly stylized.
Designers & UI artists were creating redundancy by working the layout & flows more than once, but the user experience was falling through the cracks. Unfortunately, the first iteration of integrating UX into the pipeline didn’t fix these problems, but in fact, exacerbated them.
One step forward, two steps back 🎭
I was treated as a game designer, expected to take on entire feature designs by myself that could stand side by side with my veteran game design peers’ work. However, with previous experience in UI design myself, I was more capable and comfortable taking wireframes & flows to a higher fidelity of mockup, even to a preliminary level of UI, but some of that effort was wasted as UI artists had to modify much of it to reach the level of stylized game UI that was needed. Even once we had a game UI style guide, applying it directly to my mockups stepped on the toes of a UI artist’s responsibilities and limited their opportunity to iterate and evolve the interface as our features grew.
Meanwhile, the game designers were used to starting feature designs without any specific UX input, so their layouts & interaction flows didn’t always capture the best practices in UX or explore outside-the-box thinking for more innovative interaction mechanisms; many game designers are talented at systems-oriented work, but not all are necessarily strong visual design thinkers, which showed in the UX at times. I became a kind of afterthought checkpoint for designs before UI, but trying to make meaningful and holistic UX is not a quick fix solution you can tack on after the bulk of a feature is designed, so I either had to settle on less than stellar solutions or crunch to squeeze in redesigns without taking up too much extra time.
The process still had major redundancies and ground the pipeline to a crawl by not letting subject experts stick to what they were best at. Either one UX designer wasn’t enough for a heavily interface-driven game experience, or that one designer wasn’t being utilized smartly.
Reassessing the Process 🔬
I was now also stretched too thin, doing parts of 3 roles in the time allotted for one, and I became a bottleneck in this broken process, impeding feature creation from getting done swiftly and smoothly to get into the hands of developers in time to reach our project milestones. It became apparent to the studio that trying to make a generalist out of a specialist wasn’t using my strengths to their benefit.
We asked ourselves “What can UX do to more clearly bring its expertise to the development process that doesn’t necessarily diminish or repeat existing roles and responsibilities?”. We decided to massively shift the role & the way we were doing things to create a new kind of position to better succeed at using UX to help game development, not hinder it.
Transitioning to In-House Consulting 🤝
We devised a new kind of relationship UX could have with the existing pipeline—instead of being a singular cog in the machine that could cause friction when overloaded, we envisioned consulting for UX throughout the process and with multiple parties to act as a kind of lubricant, ensuring things flowed smoothly and infused every part of the process with greater collaboration, more iteration, and better design thinking. This allowed me to maintain a vision and a bar of quality for the overall game’s UX without being a bottleneck, alleviating multiple different pain points in the process.
We injected UX consultations into the existing pipeline at 4 critical junctures — research, ideation, visualization & implementation — as a multi-touchpoint collaborator to champion design thinking and quality.
Research – Collaborative Multidisciplinary Brainstorming 🧠
Roll for Initiative: Every feature or system required a design brainstorm before starting production that always included the game designer assigned to the feature, UX & UI, and any other contributors that might be relevant to the feature architecture. The goal was to define solid requirements, collect diverse ideas, and whiteboard a basic design that everyone was on board with.
Critical Success: This way we created a collaborative space that better defined the problems, broadened our possible solutions, and by using a clear visual medium of a whiteboard, we could easily sketch layouts and flows being discussed to form the basis of the feature’s experience. This step greatly helped me leave my UX silo that few people really understood and have a chance to explain my methods & intuitions in design thinking to my peers, teaching others UX design patterns by osmosis.
Ideation – Empowering Designers through Autonomy 🚀
Roll for Intelligence: Once designers had a good UX starting point for the features & systems they were designing, I could just touch base with them along the way to help work out any UX challenges that arose, ensure the design was still following a solid UX direction, and review the final design before moving it along in the pipeline.
Critical Success: By letting the game designers work through the detailed ins and the outs of the design with a predetermined UX framework in mind, it gave them more agency to explore how and why the UX was synergizing with the system, and more opportunity to critically problem-solve with a UX lens. Our aim was to expose the game design to UX thinking earlier and more regularly in the process so that good UX principles became a natural part of the game design process, not a black box gatekept by a UX designer.
Visualization – Reuniting Interface Expertise 🤜🤛
Roll for Wisdom: By smoothing out the process prior to the UI stage of the pipeline, designs became more solidified in their flows & interaction mechanisms, reducing the need for large reworks from the UI artists, letting them focus on their own challenges in creating a fresh style, detailed assets, and maintaining accessible interface standards.
Critical Success: There was also now more room in the process to allow for UX & UI to collaborate when designs called for more unique or novel interfaces & interaction mechanisms, as is more common to see in games versus typical software experiences. Two very closely related disciplines could now combine their expertise’s to introduce more fun & innovation in the game experience for players, and just like with designers, the chance to communicate UX thinking through collaboration helped UI artists to become more familiar with UX design thinking and how it related to their craft.
Implementation – Bridging Departments 🧬
Roll for Dexterity: During implementation, issues or questions often arose regarding the specific details of expected behaviours, and developers & QA testers didn’t always know who to ask for answers between game design and UI. Since consulting allowed me to oversee the majority of all feature & systems designs from start to pass off for development, I became very familiar with details of the designs, and who owned what part of the process, so I could become a bridge between departments, becoming a go-to source for the holistic & specific experience and for directing queries to the appropriate parties.
Critical Success: When different disciplines work in a silo, the overall team dynamic suffers from a lack of knowledge sharing and communication. By bridging design & UI into a more communal experience design space, we could collectively better interface with the dev team to provide clear expectations that everyone was on the same page about, reducing situations where devs run in circles between partial feature owners getting conflicting answers, which ultimately puts the project timelines in jeopardy.
Not only did it become much clearer where UX could make a positive impact, but the production pipeline as a whole becomes a smoother experience for multiple departments and processes when we had a more holistic oversight of the content & progress of our product.
Reflection: Room to Grow 🐣
It all started as a goal to try integrating my specialized discipline into the pipeline, and it ended up making myself & my peer’s job expectations easier to manage. But with the solution we created, we also gave me room to breathe without the need to constantly focus on tangible production assets, and so my design director came to me and expressed the desire to deepen the studio’s understanding of UX beyond just the inclusion of one designer into the pipeline.
I also wanted to go beyond my contributions to the art of well UX’d layouts & flows and bring to the table more of the tools & methodologies that I knew were being utilized in UX & product design every day in tech companies, but I wasn’t seeing being done at the studio – things like prototyping, journey mapping, and UX research & testing. I knew we could level up using the power of these tried and true methods, so I started the exploration process anew and tried to integrate new ways of design thinking into our studio’s production culture.
Check out my other Medium stories to read more about that initiative.
