UX as a Competence Center for Collaboration: Workshop Methods - Steven Mathiesen, Travian Games
0GamesUR is a day-long event of knowledge-sharing for video game professionals leveraging games user research (gamesUR): user testing, game analytics, user experience (UX) processes.
UX as a Competence Center for Collaboration: Workshop Methods
The UX discipline can act as a bridge between Development Teams and Marketing, Art and Game Design, as well as other siloed disciplines in an organization. UX workshops have been an effective tool for such collaboration over the past year at Travian Games. This talk describes the different kinds of workshops we have run ranging from conceptualizing the First Time User Experience to Name Finding performed on behalf of the Marketing team. Different workshop activities and techniques will be presented with explanations about how they promote trust, raise game quality, build consensus among stakeholders, and get UX involved at the earliest points of game development. Listeners should takeaway how workshops can place UX in the center of the action and have a good idea how they might be implemented in their organization.
Steven is a psychologist with fifteen years of experience working in the Games UX field as a researcher, designer, and manager.
He is currently the Head of User Experience at Travian Games GmbH, a mid-sized gaming company with 200+ employees based in Munich, Germany. There, he leads a team of eight design professionals who provide the company with interaction design, interface design, game design, and design research.
Over the last few years, his focus has been on how to integrate the UX discipline more deeply into the organization, using psychology not only to help connect players to the game teams but also to break down organizational silos within the company.