UI/UX Designer (f/m/x)

The Position

You will be a driving force behind the ideation, design and execution of a modern user experience for games across many platforms. Working as part of a team of programmers and artists, you will be asked to readily and frequently switch between leading and following diverse efforts to put control at the player’s finger tips. In your quest for smarter solutions for design challenges old and new, you will at first integrate with existing processes and soon evaluate and challenge them with humble and constructive feedback. You will be a champion for “what works”, anticipating future needs of the project as much as making sure existing solutions remain operational throughout development.

Please be sure to have read our general introduction. While some technical or artistic aspects may not apply to this position, we think it can help give you a feeling for the kind of environment you are getting into :)

Your Responsibilities

You will help envision and create the entire interaction layer of the game. In doing so, you will specify, create, review and evolve solutions for user interaction systems based on mouse-, touch- or gamepad input.

Your daily routines include translating high-level gameplay ideas into visual and functional UI designs. Working closely with teams across disciplines, you help establish logical, readable UI solutions and usability strategies. You will guide artists and programmers to fully realize your designs, from specification to proof-of-concept prototype to production-ready UI/UX component.

You are a champion for accessibility and inclusion on any project. As such, your goal is to find pragmatic ways to accommodate special needs in your designs and when planning features with your team. You understand that we can’t make a game for everybody, but relentlessly strive to make the game accessible to as many people as possible!

You create assets such as images, animations and UI layouts as needed to communicate your intentions. There will be dedicated artists to support you but you have to be ready and equipped to step in and take over where necessary to execute on your vision.

Making your ideas understood by others is key. You don’t shy away from creating prototypes (paper, sketches, digital wireframe) to communicate ideas succinctly and clearly to your team. You review final implementations of all features regularly to ensure proper execution and to provide a consistent experience across different gaming devices and form factors.

Ultimately, your work must empower players to easily navigate a game in a way that feels natural to them. To this end, you consciously design information hierarchy, density and interplay across all player-facing systems. To achieve this sublime goal you work closely with game designers to determine the best controls and inputs to support game features for a fluid and consistent player experience.

Requirements

We know that stringent requirements can be intimidating when first applying for a job. We don’t want to alienate promising candidates with expensive and oftentimes pretentious words, but we need to say it plain and fair: This is not an entry-level position. You’d be one of very few UX specialists on our staff and often the only one on your particular game team. That means that our assessment of your fitness for the role is limited by what we know right now. Our recruiting process, imperfect as it may be, aims at gaining confidence that you will be able to hit the ground running and make the role your own. Doing so, you will have to make things work with limited supervision. You can, however, rely on the ample technical and artistic experience of your co-workers inside and outside the project. If you think that our requirements don’t make sense, please do not shy away from making a case for yourself! We’re looking forward to being wowed by your personal understanding of the field :)

Never losing sight of the big picture, you are proficient in envisioning, prototyping and final execution. Your knowledge of tools and methods for rapid prototyping and wire-framing goes hand in hand with the ability to anticipate and accommodate changing requirements in your designs. And while you can’t always prepare for everything, you are pragmatic about change: You’ll seek to salvage and modify when possible, but you’ll also know when to ditch a failed attempt.

Your knowledge of accessibility and inclusion allows you to confidently make, analyze and champion decisions on the addition of supporting features for special needs. You casually collect low-hanging fruit while steering clear of hopeless time-sinks and are aware of the complex trade-offs in-between.

You sport solid skills in digital illustration and graphic design, including layout and typography, manifest in your command over Photoshop, Illustrator & After Effects. This is rounded out by a good understanding of Motion design & Motion Graphics.

You are familiar with UX concepts, methodologies and workflows. You have gained some experience in the varied UI implementation workflows in video game projects and are strangely eager to add sketchy new ones to your repertoire. Before you improve them to be less sketchy, that is. You have collaborated as a UX designer on at least one released console and/or PC game.

Working at the intersection of various departments and efforts, you communicate clearly and precisely, both written and verbally, in English. Working in UX means that, frankly, everybody thinks they can do your job. Your understanding and empathy for other points of view is paired with the ability to make a convincing positive case for your proposed solutions. Failure of others or yourself to deliver on your ideas does not easily discourage you.

Compensation & perks

If you have three years of relevant professional experience, you can look forward to an annual gross salary of €48.500,-. If you have fewer, more or other additional qualifications, an adjustment can be negotiated. This covers 38.5 hours a week at around 44 weeks per year, when bank holidays and your mandatory vacation are taken into account.

On top of that, we offer the following perks:

• Spend one paid day per month on personal training and learning
• Flexible working hours (core office hours 10:00h-16:00h)
• Liberal remote-office policy
• Paid overtime (no all-inclusive contracts)
• 25 days of paid vacation (guaranteed by labor law) and around ten public holidays per year
• Monthly get-togethers with free drinks
• Free weekly Yoga classes (currently via remote video)
• Monthly on-site massages for a reduced price (currently on hiatus over COVID concerns)
• Free coffee, tea, soda and fruit