006 - Psychology and UX

User Experience ("UX" for short) is one of those disciplines in the gaming industry often tied to psychology. And given how it's interested in understanding and quantifying the experiences of the people who play video games, interact with hardware, and navigate through menus, it's easy to see how an understanding of attention, perception, cognition, mental heuristics, learning, and memory can help UX researchers do their jobs.

In this episode I talk to Celia Hodent, the Director of User Experience at Epic Games and a psychology Ph.D. Hodent and her team help Epic make sure that its customers have the experiences that its game designers envision, and in this podcast she explains how an understanding of psychology, knowledge of research methods, and experience in data management help her do that. She also shares some advice for anyone interested in getting into this line of work.

Thanks also to Caryn Vainio, who set the stage for what UX is and why it matters. Check out her portfolio and website.



Info on this week's guests:
Celia Hodent's websitefollow her on Twitter


Audio Credits:
Robot Motivation by The Polish Ambassador, licensed under Creative Commons: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0Hep Cats by Kevin MacLeod Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribut