UX Evangelism and clarity in a maturing industry
If you work in UX, you’ve likely encountered this situation: joining a project team where many members don’t fully understand what UX entails or how it benefits the overall effort. Some hold misconceptions about UX’s role, which can create barriers. This is a common hurdle for UX professionals at various stages of their careers.
The challenge often isn’t in proving UX’s value—it’s effectively communicating that value across a team with diverse perspectives and priorities. Game designers, engineers, and business managers each approach projects with different goals and vocabularies. Delivering the same message to all of them can lead to mixed outcomes.
To address this, tailor your communication to the audience. Understand what matters most to each stakeholder:
For Game Designers, emphasize how UX enhances player engagement and experience, leading to richer gameplay and creative freedom.
For Engineers, focus on how early UX involvement can reduce rework, minimize bugs related to user flows, and streamline technical implementation.
For Business Operations, highlight the cost savings, faster time-to-market, and stronger user retention that UX contributes to the bottom line.
By framing UX’s impact in terms relevant to each team member, you build a shared understanding and buy-in. UX is a strategic partner that helps the team move faster and smarter. Your role is to convey that message clearly and contextually, turning uncertainty and misconceptions into collaborative opportunity.
The Mindset
When discussing UX with teams or individual members, approach every conversation with curiosity and humility. Your role is not to criticize or impose your ideals on their process. Instead, your primary purpose is to support and assist. Rome wasn’t built in a day as they say. A single conversation won’t instantly change minds. Remember, people often think with their hearts, so connect on that level. Aim to build professional relationships grounded in respect and trust. Demonstrate that your goal is to help them improve their work while easing challenges they face. Emphasize that “I am here to help.”
Understanding starts with an analogy
The first step is to distill UX into a universally understood analog. It’s important to establish common ground in your discussion so that you can return to that analogy as necessary. My favorite version of this distillation comes from the book “The Pocket Mentor for Video Game UX UI” by Simon Brewer.
“Imagine UI as a car. The wheels, seats, and buttons are the interface. The engine, gears, and electronics are all logic and programming. UX is all these elements plus the reason we need the car in the first place. It’s how we know how to drive and how we feel once we are inside.”
- Simon Brewer
A game can have stunning visuals yet suffer from an unusable UI, or run smoothly but remain unplayable because players don’t understand what to do. UX encompasses the entire experience, both inside and outside the game. It includes the expectations and mindset players bring before they start, as well as the lasting impressions they carry away after playing.
Conversational clarification
Teams still in the early stages of UX maturity often express concerns such as:
"UX is just about making the game easier."
"UX dumbs down the title."
"UX gets in the way and slows the process down. We need to be fast and agile."
"We already know our target audience from competitors; we just need to copy them."
These statements highlight the need for clarification. Each project should be treated as a unique challenge. Most people are not resistant out of malice; rather, they lack a full understanding of how UX benefits the entire process. As humans, we tend to rely on familiar approaches. If a project succeeded without UX before, the question arises: why implement UX now? If success was due to being first to market previously, the pressure to maintain that speed can lead to overlooking the long-term value UX provides.
It’s essential to communicate that UX is not an obstacle but a strategic asset that improves player engagement, streamlines development, and ultimately helps the game succeed—not just in speed, but in quality and player satisfaction. Approach each point with empathy and you will change minds. Here are a few examples of responses you can use to the above:
UX is not about simply making a game easier. A game without friction and challenge becomes nothing more than a screensaver. The true goal of UX is to refine and clarify your creative vision, allowing you to present it in its purest form to your audience. UX focuses on minimizing the small obstacles that detract from your intended gameplay and enjoyment, while preserving the intentional challenges that engage and motivate the player.
UX is not about simplifying a title to the point of losing its depth. A mystery without intrigue or curiosity becomes dull. UX is about conveying your story and its complexities to as wide an audience as possible. We aim to preserve any challenges that players can control while removing barriers they cannot overcome.
Using the vehicle analogy: “We all drive the same car, and the challenge of driving is the same for everyone. But if you can’t adjust the seat to reach the pedals, you can’t fully enjoy the drive.” In this context, gameplay is the driving challenge. Our goal is to keep that challenge consistent for all players, enabling you to create the experience you envision, balance it properly, and sustain it over time. Ultimately, we want to ensure everyone can enjoy the drive.
When implemented early and consistently, UX saves projects hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs. UX research helps us understand who our players are, their mental models, and their preferences. This insight prevents months of costly development iterations later in production and can even eliminate entire rounds of alpha testing—a process that often requires thousands of dollars, multiple studios, and external contractors.
Through UX wireframing and rapid iteration, we quickly explore dozens of ideas with minimal need for engineers or complex involvement from secondary teams. This approach allows other teams to focus on their internal priorities while we prototype game elements that don’t demand extensive animation or engineering resources.
For example, while working on a major AAA IP, we aimed to create a diegetic store for players to visit and make purchases—similar to systems found in games like Star Citizen. Instead of spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on level design, modeling, animation, VO, programming, and UI just to test the concept, we set up a rapid wireframe storyboard clickthrough with support from Concept Art and UI teams. This enabled us to prototype multiple layout and experience options and put them in front of stakeholders within a single release cycle.
By reducing the number of involved teams, we minimized impact and shortened the timeline by months, all while expanding the range of options tested. Rapid prototyping done early and often remains an underutilized yet extremely powerful tool in the developer’s toolkit.
Understanding your target audience for a game is not the same as truly knowing the real audience. In today's gaming industry, many players prefer sticking with familiar titles. For example, games like Fortnite maintain long-term engagement far better than most new releases. This trend holds true across nearly every genre.
Simply copying your competitors’ strategies is a disservice to your product. To convince players to switch from a game they’re already invested in, you must offer value that overcomes their reluctance and loss aversion. This is where user experience (UX) design becomes essential.
UX helps identify unique opportunities for innovation while maintaining enough familiarity to avoid excessive development costs and align with principles like Jakob’s Law—where users expect consistent patterns across applications . By balancing novelty with comfort, you can create a compelling experience that attracts and retains players without breaking the bank on research and development.
It’s up to you now
From this point forward, it’s all about adding a personal touch. Having key talking points alone doesn’t guarantee success; building genuine connections and demonstrating investment is essential. Collaborate with your team to proactively engage with other teams and advocate for your value. By emphasizing your role not only as a helper but also as a provider of vital, time-saving tools, you can foster trust and mutual respect across teams.
Set aside a dedicated block of time each sprint specifically for outreach. Use this opportunity to reconnect with teams you haven’t engaged with recently and offer consultations for smaller needs. If you are in a leadership position, leverage this time to connect with fellow leaders, build trust, and broaden your collective understanding. This consistent, intentional outreach strengthens relationships and drives collaboration.
