#15 The Role of UX in the Most Played Computer Game “League of Legends”
Humans love to play games! So does Alex Wheeler, Senior UX Designer at Riot Game. Alex spent many years developing the UX for champions of the most played online game League of Legends.
Alex shares great insights about the whole process of developing e.g. a new champion or changes on the client side for more than 120 Million active users. He touched all the parts from the discovery and wireframing to the development and rollout.
Next to that, he shared why friction in UX and games is so important.
Alex Article: https://medium.com/riot-games-ux-design/ux-design-in-the-games-industry-50b0572631c3
Episode Minutes
Table of content
0:30 - Intro Alex Wheeler
4:35 - The addicting nature of computer games
6:45 - Intentional friction the UX
9:45 - Developing champions in League of Legends as UX Designer
15:00 - Persona-based product development
18:00 - Product discovery in gaming & LoL
20:50 - Role & collaboration with Product Managers & Owners
25:15 - When employees are users of your product
30:00 - Using data to design experiences
36:15 - Rolling out updates & new features
39:30 - Designing for 26 countries with different languages & cultures
43:50 - It’s all about documentation
46:10 - Alex 3 key values of designing user experiences
49:00 - Debrief Alex & Christian
What is the role of a UX Game Designer at Riot?
Alex W.: I've been at Riot for more than four years now. I've worked on a bunch of different teams at Riot and UX is a space I'm passionate about.
I think everybody on some level is passionate about UX, right? Everybody hates using bad products. But not every team at Riot works identically, but in general, at Riot, it really depends on what phase of the project you're on. So we can start, by just defining the different phases of products that exist and what we do at each phase.
There's never a shortage of problems to be solved, especially in the gaming space or in a game like “League” or in a game like “Valorant” or any of the products that Riot makes. And so we start off in discovery. What can we do? What should we do? And that involves a lot of talking to different people, and aligning with stakeholders.
And the design tools we utilize at that step is really a lot of alignment tools. A Designer's superpower is communicating via pictures. We do pictures better than those people. And so that's low-fidelity, wireframes sketches storyboards. You can utilize whatever thing you're most comfortable with, but you're not trying to sell somebody in a specific direction.
You're just trying to communicate an idea. And then the next big step is vision, right after you've gone through discovery. After you've found where you want to focus your efforts on, you have to try and convince the rest of the world and all the people with all the money to give you that money so that you can create the change that you want to see.
And almost all the time that involves creating a vision so that you can align with Developers, Product Owners, and business people on what the world is going to look like after they have funded your project. And that involves a lot of, again, storytelling, wireframing, user journey maps, and user journey flows.
Why are games so addicting and what impact does the UX role play?
Answer: The experience of playing a game starts not when you're playing the game, but when you decide you want to play the game!
For our different user groups, you have a new user who has never played before, right? Their experience probably starts on a Discord call with their friends who are playing the game or maybe on Reddit or maybe somewhere where they find out about the game. And every moment after that is part of the user experience. The Designer's job, that website download speed, the install time, like all of that. And none of that is why you're playing the game. None of that contributes to the addicting nature of the game.
What contributes to the addicting nature of the game is friction, which is counterintuitive to a lot of UX Designers because generally in Tech UX Design is about reducing or removing friction. In games, in a particular game loop, it's about adding friction, because if everything is seamless and smooth, the gratification you get from getting a little bit better at casting that spell doing a little bit more DPS in WoW, or in League (LoL) CS-sing (farming) a little bit better. It doesn't feel as good, but if you can watch yourself get better at something that is difficult.
That's addicting! People love the feeling of improvement and that's it. So that's the difference between designing UX for a game specifically, then maybe the products around the game or the experience around a game because in a game you're really designing intentional friction.
How do you define and prioritize features for a large number of personas?
Game designers have a much harder job than UX here because UX is like “humans are humans.” So like the usability is across all of those different groups, but game designers, have the biggest challenge here. From my understanding, generally, they try to over-serve one particular audience group because when you're designing for a particular group of people and that you're going to really like it, at least even if it doesn't resonate with everyone, a group of people is going to be really happy and they're gonna associate with it.
And that's another way to pull different people from other groups into that group. If you're over-serving one group really well, you can potentially get other people to expand their horizons.
What are the key things you need to look at during the product discovery for games?
… tune in to learn more 🎧
