How to get a job as a game UX designer
Alan Wen
Thursday 14th April 2022
Despite emerging in the games industry since the beginning of the previous decade, with origins in web design and primarily mobile gaming, the role of user experience (UX) design in games can still be confused or absent from a development team, and varies wildly from studio to studio.
Some developers might have a role or team wholly dedicated to this area, others may have the role sit between design or art teams, or UX can also be rolled in with the design of the user interface (UI), even though the two are not the same.
But while UI design is concerned with what can be seen on screen, such as menus, buttons or HUD, UX design encompasses the whole player experience.
"I always see it as a glue job, someone who sits between all the departments making a game to get the best experience for the user"
Caitlin Goodale
"UX deals with how we teach the player, onboard them in a game, how we present them the various systems and their interaction with them," says Alex Tokmakchiev, lead UI/UX game designer at Creative Assembly Sofia.
As this can cover other elements, including audio cues, level design, and controller inputs, Caitlin Goodale, head of UX design for luxury styling game Drest sums up the job succinctly: "I always see it as a glue job, someone who sits between all the different departments making a game to try and get the best experience for the user at the end of the day."
We asked Tokmakchiev, Goodale and two other game UX specialists how one can get into the games industry in this important role.
Although you can find both short and long courses in UX (Human-Computer Interaction is also a relevant field in Computer Science), all of our interviewees agreed that there are no hard formal
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