On May 12th 2016, Epic Games hosted the inaugural Game UX Summit in Durham (NC) to discuss the current state of User Experience in the video game industry. This event brought together renowned speakers from various UX-related disciplines including Human Factors, Human-Computer Interaction, UX Design, User Research, Behavioral Economics, Accessibility and Data Science. The keynote speakers were the esteemed Dan Ariely and Don Norman, who popularized the term “user experience” in the 90s.
This inaugural event attracted over 250 attendees, allowing for a unique opportunity to network around our passion for UX in the game industry. Throughout the sessions, 15 excellent speakers shared their best practices, tackled specific game-focused UX challenges, offered new perspectives and sparked some debates. You can watch most of the Game UX Summit 2016 sessions on the Epic Games YouTube page, read a summary for all the sessions here, and even check out the photos from the event on the Unreal Engine Facebook page.
Given the excitement generated by this first edition, we are delighted to announce that Epic Games will partner with Ubisoft Toronto to organize the Game UX Summit 2017. Ubisoft will be hosting next year’s edition in Toronto on October 4-5, 2017. More information will be posted soon, but you can already save the date!
If you wish to receive updates about the event or if you would like to submit a talk, you can sign up here and be on the lookout for #GameUXsummit on Twitter.
Let’s keep spreading the UX love!
Here’s the complete speaker list in order of appearance: Anne McLaughlin (Associate Professor in Psychology, NC State University), Anders Johansson (Lead UI Designer, Ubisoft Massive), Andrew Przybylski (Experimental Psychologist, Oxford Internet Institute), Ian Livingston (Senior User Experience Researcher, EA Canada), Jordan Shapiro (Senior Fellow for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, Sesame Workshop), Fran Blumberg (Associate Professor of Psychological & Educational Services, Fordham University), Matthew Peterson (Co-founder, CEO and Senior Scientist, MIND Research Institute), Asi Burak (CEO, Power Play), Chris Grant (User Experience Director, King), Ian Hamilton (UX Designer and Accessibility Specialist), Steve Mack (Researcher and Analyst, Riot Games), David Lightbown (User Experience Director, Ubisoft Montreal), Jennifer Ash (UI Designer, Bungie), Dan Ariely (Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics, Duke University), Don Norman (Director of the Design Lab, UC San Diego).
We would like to thank our sponsors who helped us make this event a success: NVIDIA, iMotions, VGMarket, Plantronics, Ingeniak, IGDA, Interana, UX.guide, Playtest Cloud, SCAD, and Quantic Foundry.