A Day in the Life of a Video Game UX Designer - working from home
I’m a UX Designer working on a video game at Creative Assembly in the UK. This is how a day is an average workday for me when we are in the middle of a game project — Working from home.
This is not a big and exciting day, because most days are not action-packed or hectic with deadlines.
☕ 8am — Wake up
Drink Water + Make Coffee + Morning routine
Check Social Media
(sometimes) Write on a Medium Article
📝 9am — Planning my day
I start my workday by writing a list of what I want to do and accomplish in the day. If there are any tasks I didn’t complete yesterday I move them over to today’s list, if I need to send any message to anyone or some information I need to find out from people. I also catch up on emails and read chats in Teams.
🙋♀️ 9.30am — Standups
We have different cross-discipline teams at work (groups focused on different areas of the game) and we start the day by giving a short report on what each one of us completed the day before, if we encountered any problems, and what we will do today.
Each Stand-up is usually between 10–15 min. It’s not a 1 hour long standup.
This is also a great time to catch problems early and get an understanding of what everyone is focused on. We use Jira to keep track of everyones daily tasks and progress.
🖥️ 10.30am — Designing
Time to create Mockups, find inspirations/references, make updates to previous designs, screen flows, document, and describe designs on Confluence. I use Adobe Xd to create my Mockups and design (Figma is also really popular with other designers). I also have a lot of mini chats with different people over Teams to talk about small decisions that need clarity or something I missed designing when I worked on the screen the first time. (I work on different areas of the game at different times.)
It can sometimes be difficult to remember all the small decisions and discussions we had, sometimes several months ago, when I first created the Mockups for it. So it’s important to write up as much and clearly as possible. Both for other people to understand the design, and for myself when I come back to the design (months) later.
🎮 12pm— Playtest
Several times per week we playtest the game together with the Design team and QA people. There’s usually a list of new features or changes in the game that we want to focus on. We play the game together to discuss the changes, feedback on how we like it (or not), problems we encounter, and bugs we want to fix next.
🥗 12.45 — Lunch
When working from home I usually make lunch at home. If the weather is nice (that’s not always the case here in the UK) I take a short walk to get some air.
Sometimes I go out to get takeaway food or meet up with colleagues for lunch. It’s great living central in a small town with close access to most shops & restaurants!
💬 2pm — Meetings
There’s usually some type of meeting in the afternoon where we talk about some piece of feedback, a new design idea we want to test out, or something that hasn’t worked out as we hoped and we need to start over on it (or scrap the idea.)
When talking to the Game Designers I ask a lot of questions to figure out what I’m designing for:
My goal is to figure out how they want a feature to work, how they want players to behave with this change, what we need the player to understand to use it, how important this feature/design is at that moment in the game (the priority) if this design is needed to be seen or explained in any other areas of the game to be fully understood and what type of feedback method that fits best: UI, texts, audio, VFX, 3D, animations, screen effects, etc.
📧 💬 3pm — Chats, emails & design
Some chats we have in emails or Teams chats, and sometimes I just into a quick call with someone to talk through some ideas face to face. I can usually make some quick sketches to show people some ideas for how we can solve it and to better talk about what direction we want to go in.
🍌 4pm — Snack
You need a small snack break sometimes to get energy! When working from home I can just go and grab something in my kitchen.
🖥️ 4pm — Design & Document
Continue on designs for the day, updating Confluence, answering questions in emails or text chats on designs I have sent people during the day, and try to finish some tasks before the day ends. Some tasks I want to finish whilst I have it fresh in my mind but other I’ll continue on the next day.
Documentation of designs and descriptions of how they should work is not only for me to remember at a later date. This is for the team to work better together because both UI Artists and Programmers use the Mockups and documentation to work on and implement the design later.
🌳 🍜 6pm — After work
Take a walk around a park (I need to see some nature after a long day inside)+ listen to an Audiobook. Usually a book about design, technology, life or other career improvements.
Workout (every other day)
Make Dinner
(Some nights) I play DnD with colleges across the Creative Assembly teams.
Watch a show, movie, or play a Switch or PC game.
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