Building UX Process from scratch: Experiences of UX at small & mid-sized studios - GRUXonline Panel
9It can be daunting to be one of the few UX people on your team, let alone your whole company. This panel will be a discussion about our personal experiences of working in smaller teams, where budgets and resources are tight, and getting creative to showcase the value of UX. The aim is always to support the development of collaborative environments where player experience is at the center, but how do you get stakeholder buy in, run research projects and devise an iterative design process when time is of the essence?
Hear from panelists who have previous experiences of this whilst others currently have these responsibilities for the first time! Join us as we chat about what we have learnt from our failures as well as small but impactful steps taken to empower teams and create exceptional user experiences.
Nida Ahmad is a UX Designer and User Researcher at Netspeak Games. With a focus on accessibility and psychology, she creates playful and usable user experiences. She is dedicated to making the industry a welcoming place, having served as a reader for the BAFTA Young Games Designer Awards and speaker at industry events on the importance of UX in Game Development. She is also part of the founding team of POC in Play, an initiative to increase the inclusion and retention of People of Colour in the industry.
Emma Varjo is the UX Lead at Frozenbyte. She works hard to ensure everyone has a great experience when playing games made at Frozenbyte. This she does by using her knowledge of Human-Computer Interaction, running playtests and gathering feedback from players, and generally just taking to people a lot.
Kirk Rodgers-Isordia does games research & mad science at Electronic Arts, where he leads a small team to support EA’s LA studios: Respawn, Industrial Toys, & DICE LA. Recently, he also led foundational work on streaming disruptions to gameplay and cross-functional research on the Stadia controller at Google Stadia. It’s possible Kirk only does UXR work to fund his Destiny 2 addiction.