Hey U(X Designer), Play a Video Game Every Now and Then

My life has always been an unorganised mess. It’s not uncommon for me to find my TV remote in the fridge, just to give you an example. Until recently I never realised that my personal life and professional career are basically like night and day. Where my personal life is mostly led by my gut feeling, my professional career as a UX designer is nothing like that. I work with a carefully chosen set of tools and following a well organised workflow to deliver my problem solving designs. I never questioned myself how or why this came to be, until a colleague at work pointed this out to me. Time to do some self-research.
When I was only 16 years old, I applied for a position at a small PlayStation related website. With basically nothing to lose at that young age, I didn’t really expect much of it. I was just so into gaming that I wanted to share my thoughts and opinions online. The chief editor thought my writing was a bit capricious, but he admired my enthusiasm. He gave me a position as a news writer. Basically, this meant I had to scavenge the internet for news about games and write about it. I loved it.
In the following months I put all my effort into showing the editors and management I was better than just writing about news. Now that I opened this door I wanted to know how far I could get. In the years after I interviewed my idols from the industry like David Cage, creator of games like Heavy Rain and most recently Detroit: Become Human. I visited big conferences and events like GamesCom or the European Call of Duty finals. I wrote reviews about fan favourites like: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Hitman and Rainbow Six: Siege. It was the time of my life. My high school suffered terribly.

Looking back 10 years later I realise that these experiences made me a very methodical designer. The core of this lies in years of reviewing games; dissecting them and explaining to readers why something is well designed or not. Things like character customisation, level design, storytelling, gameplay, audio and all these other ingredients make a game good or bad in a reviewers eye. Just like user research, personas, UI design, flow and usability are ingredients that make a good digital product. It almost looks too obvious to not have realised this.
“Looking back 10 years later I realise that these experiences made me a very methodical designer.”
It’s not uncommon for designers to look at games for inspiration or learnings. Good games are capable of keeping users focussed and interested for hours at a time, something a lot of digital products are struggling with. Author and Keynote speaker Yu-kai Chou is an expert on Gamification and Behavioural Design, and he is a big inspiration for me personally. If you’re interested, check out his inspiring TED-talk.
So my advice to you designers is the following; play a video game every now and then. It relieves a bit of stress from your work and can also inspire you at the same time. Seems like the perfect combination to me. Have fun!
Tip: pay attention to the reward systems of mobile games, they often have pretty ingenious designs to keep you playing.
