In this episode, we are joined by Ruwan Fernando, a seasoned UX leader with expertise in AAA games, SaaS, and gamification. With experience across five countries, he brings a unique perspective on design, storytelling, and user engagement. Tune in as we explore his journey, industry insights, and the evolving role of UX in gaming. Discussion points: ~ How did your journey into UX and game design begin? 1:45 ~ How did your expectations of the gaming industry change over time? 7:20 ~ Do you need to be a gamer to succeed in the industry? 12:50 ~ Rapid fire round 17:55 ~ What are you looking forward to at GDC, and how can people connect with you? 22:59 ~ Which of your work/accomplishments are you most proud of? 23:23 ~ What’s your top advice for aspiring game designers and UX professionals? 29:33 Show notes: ~ UX is a job of communication. Design just happens along the way. UX is all about communicating your vision as someone making a product to the expectations of a user who's expecting to use it. It's shortening the distance between the two. ~ Technology is experienced through the interface. If you don't build the interface, then you've built a technology that will never be experienced. ~ The longer we leave people out of the discussion, the more the product itself fails to connect with its audience. ~ We use things like pressure, time, scarcity, and tension to ramp up or down the emotional connection to a story. If a game isn’t emotionally engaging, it’s not an engaging story. ~ If you only ever observe other people's solutions, what you're observing is a list of compromises that you have never seen. So you take that solution and all the compromises with it without understanding what they were. Then you build something based on compromises on which you further compromise. ~ The minute you say ‘I prefer it this way,’ you take what is a wide-angle perspective and narrow it to one. But we need to appeal to millions of people, not just ourselves. ~ Instead of going wide, I recommend you narrow focus, become incredible at it, and then graduate to the next.
Link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruwan-f/ https://adplist.org/mentors/ruwan-fernando
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