New UI/UX Arena
At Scientific Games, we planned on making a fundamental adjustment to our team structure. The company was going full force into the mobile market with ALL their digital products. With the rapid rise of the need for the User Experience skillset, we started to invest.
Year 4
I started to look at how we could incorporate the UI/UX philosophies into all our products. We always made a conscious effort to give players and users a streamlined journey. This would allow us to start blending the process into our standards and guidelines. User Experience is inherently related to data and research. They help guide and justify design choices.
We changed over some of Team C's (Mobile Team) members and invested in teaching our current team the foundation of UI/UX through external training programs. This allowed anyone with interest and passion to be part of our growing new team.
We also had a couple open positions that were approved. The goal was to hire core level UI/UX designers and developers. In this particular case, bringing in external talent was essential to get us a better view of the landscape and increase the team’s output.
The teams looked like this:
Team A (Creation Team)
-
1x Lead Artist
-
2x Senior Artists
-
1x Core Artist
-
1x Associate Artist
Team B (Conversion Team)
-
1x Associate Lead Artist
-
2x Core Artists
-
1x Associate Artist
Team C (UI/UX Design Team)
-
1x Principal Design Manager
-
2x UI/UX Designers
-
2x UI/UX Developers
Year 5
In year 5, our team remained mostly unchanged. We did reduce Team A (Creation Team) by shuffling the team members more towards Conversion and UI/UX Design. We were doing fewer original art titles, so the creation team members needed to adapt. Fortunately, we had internal training available, so we didn’t need to reduce head count as a result of the shift.
With the explosion of new device formats and the rest of the world shifting to handheld gaming, proper design and player journeys became increasingly important. This justified the head count increase.
Team A (Creation Team)
-
1x Senior Artist
-
1x Core Artist
Team B (Conversion Team)
-
1x Associate Lead Artist
-
2x Core Artists
-
1x Associate Artist
-
Team C (UI/UX Design Team)
-
1x Principal Design Manager
-
3x UI/UX Designers
-
2x UI/UX Developers
-
2x Visual Designers
Adding a new discipline to our creative team was a challenging and rewarding process. There were many similarities in practice and tools, but there were many differences with our existing skill set. I enjoyed the challenge of finding a way to integrate new skills into our team. We were in a rapidly changing industry, and we needed to creatively adapt to the environment. We did that with confidence.