One of my favorite things about working at Outfit7 (Ekipa2 subsidiary) is that if you identify something that your team needs, or that another team needs, or even that the company needs, everyone will hear you out and help make it happen. All it takes is enthusiasm, passion, and belief!
And I know this from experience because this is exactly how UX (User Experience) research started at Outfit7, and how I forged the path to my current role as Senior Lead UX Researcher.
The UX Research team is a bridge between Outfit7 players and the product team. By understanding Outfit7 users and their needs, we can make Outfit7 games clear, intuitive, and enjoyable to play. While on the other hand, we also have to understand what the product team needs to help them make informed decisions.
And I love doing this! But I must admit that at the start of my career I had a very different career path in mind.
Exactly what I’d been missing
I studied marketing communication studies and, when I was a student, my dream was to work on marketing campaigns and TV advertising. And that’s why I started working at an advertising agency when I was still a student. But I pretty quickly figured out that research was actually the aspect of marketing and advertising that appealed to me most. It turned out that I was more interested in understanding the audience than in the creative process of producing ads and marketing campaigns.
So, after a while I switched jobs to a market research agency. At first I was mostly working on data-driven quantitative analysis. But then the agency’s management realized they needed more support with qualitative research, and asked me, “Can you jump in and help us here?” And I said, “OK, let’s try it.” It didn’t take long to discover that I loved this kind of work. After running just one focus group, I was hooked!
I enjoyed my time at that agency and progressed steadily through the ranks, but something was missing. I wanted to follow through on my work, to make sure my analysis was being implemented properly. But I couldn’t do that because I wasn’t part of the client’s company. And this is why, in 2017, I applied for a market research position at Outfit7 (Ekipa2 subsidiary).
During the hiring process, when I was discussing my background with the hiring manager, Jernej Česen, qualitative research and web page testing came up. So, we started discussing it, and if and how we could apply some principles from those fields to games. In the end I was hired as a market researcher, but sure enough, after only about 6 months, I switched to UX research.
Up until that point, UX research hadn’t formally existed at Outfit7. Product managers would user-test games, but mostly just before release, only really at the surface level, and in a way that was not as structured as we eventually started doing it.
I felt that as a UX researcher I was having an impact. It was eye-opening in a lot of ways, and we quickly started changing things. I got exactly what I’d been missing in my previous job.
Initiative made it happen
At around that same time another colleague joined the company as a dedicated UX designer. Inevitably, our paths crossed and we realized that we should connect our work. I’m proud that we connected on our own, figuring out how we should collaborate together as we went along. It was our decision to work closely together, and we used our initiative to make it happen. We realized that we needed each other and that we could support each other, and that’s how the UX team started to take shape.
So, at that point, both the research and design sides of UX were “one-person bands”, and we needed to figure it out between the two of us. We wanted to try running a more detailed test of a game to see how the process and the results would look. It went well, and we got buy-in, but our role was still “on-demand.” We would be asked to test a game when it was almost done, so my role was reactive to the needs at a given time.
But then we started to become more and more proactive, trying to establish some processes whereby user research could support the game development process. We didn’t just want to be reacting to needs as they arose, we wanted to figure out what UX needs were going to be before game features were fully implemented, because of course it takes much more time to fix issues on a near-complete game. So the role, responsibilities, and focus of the UX team developed over time.
Putting user testing to the test
I remember that at the start of the Talking Tom Hero Dash project, there was a lot of discussion about whether players would understand that they were supposed to hit the Rakoonz, and not avoid them. Half of the team said that players wouldn’t hit them because they wouldn’t want to hurt them, and the other half said that they would just hit all of them because they wouldn’t care. I just said, “Guys, why don’t we test this?” We had never tested prototypes up to that point, but it turned out to be quick and easy to do.
And the players in the user test did hit the Rakoonz, but they rationalized what they were doing and put it into nice words. So, they were picking up the Rakoonz, and catching them, not hitting them or hurting them. And we wouldn’t have known that without testing it. Everyone was just arguing about it, and no one quite had it right.
When I started, assumptions like that often came down to who could present their opinion most strongly. But now when a team is having these kinds of discussions, they’ll say, “Let’s ask UX Research if they can test this and find out what the users think.” This is such positive progress, and I’m so proud that it started happening because just two of us had the enthusiasm to take the initiative. I love that things like that can happen here!
I also love the people at Outfit7. I can honestly say that I’ve made a lot of really good friends thanks to this job - like, really good, close friends - and I hope I will keep meeting new people and making more new friends. You can talk to basically everyone, and everyone can talk to you, and you can be really honest and open. So, I like this little community that we have, both as a whole Outfit7 group, and also within the environment of the people I have most contact with.
And finally, I’m still really passionate about Talking Tom & Friends - I always have been. I love this brand and its audience. They are the most appreciative audience out there. When I see them playing Outfit7 games, and I see their genuine reactions and how passionate they are about it; that’s when I know why I do this. It’s so rewarding and fulfilling to see Outfit7 games making their audience feel good, and that’s why I’m so happy I took the UX research path.
