University of Illinois Chicago

Trent University

Let's make great games, together!

Raising Starts is an incubator for tech startups, accelerating development of studio game ideas and prepare them for investment and global breakthrough.

Advised and mentored Shosha Games studios with strategy, biz dev, development, game design. Participated in the accelerator ecosystem.

Science Technology Park Belgrade - Naučno-tehnološki park Beograd

Advisor, Mentor

The International conference on HCI in Games (HCI-Games) intends to help, promote and encourage research in this field by providing a forum for interaction and exchanges among researchers, academics, and practitioners in the fields of HCI and games. The Conference addresses HCI principles, methods and tools for better games.

HCI Games Conference

Program Board Member

As CEO I am responsible for setting strategic goals, growing and empowering our team, and ensuring that we build the best UX and UI solutions for our game development and publishing partners.

We've generated $10M in revenue during our first five years of operation and I couldn't be more excited about what the next five years will bring for us, our people, and our clients.

UX is Fine

Founder & CEO

The Indie Games Accelerator from Google Play is a three-month digital accelerator program for high potential indie games studios from around the world.

The program is designed to bring the best of Google’s programs, products, people and technology to high potential indie games.

Google Play

The Serious Games Showcase & Challenge (SGS&C) is the premier venue for recognition of excellence in the field of Serious Games development.

Serious Games Showcase & Challenge (SGS&C)

Judge

Is your game fun? Are you hitting your experience targets? Do you need help figuring out how to “move the needle” without breaking your budget and timeline? How do you mitigate risk when you want to innovate? Should you GO, pivot, or kill?

I provide an independent evaluation of your game through the eyes of an expert who has consulted as UX researcher, director, producer, and game designer on scores of games over my 22 years. 

I also help teams drive UX best practices into their development pipeline and roadmap, and coach, advise, and mentor leads and individual contributors. 

Sound useful? Let’s talk!

Jason Schklar Consults!

Founder & Chief Consultant

Advised and mentored cohort startups for an international tech accelerator program. Judged proposals to be included in the cohort. Focused on UX and product design and shared games industry advice and connections.

MassChallenge

Advisor, Mentor, and Judge

The CCR Cancer Innovation Laboratory (CIL) is a transdisciplinary hub to explore fundamental biological concepts and mechanisms relevant to cancer. Research in the CIL is characterized by its highly interdisciplinary nature of bringing together experts from various backgrounds, including immunologists, cell biologists, computational biologists, chemists, geneticists, virologists and cancer biologists and a high degree of innovation, creativity and risk in the questions that are being pursued.

National Cancer Institute (NCI)

Mentor, Subject Matter Expert

UX is Fine was founded as a way to bring our expertise and experience to developers and publishers looking for the best UX an UI consulting, direction, and design.

As Chief Consultant I provided independent game consultations through the eyes of an expert with decades of experience as a UX researcher, director, producer, and game designer on scores of games.

The kinds of questions I helped clients answer were: Is your game fun? Are you hitting your experience targets? Do you need help figuring out how to “move the needle” without breaking your budget and timeline? How do you mitigate risk when you want to innovate? Should you GO, pivot, or kill?

As a member of the Disney Interactive Creative Trust I provided UX and game design feedback on various Disney Interactive titles across all platforms.

The Walt Disney Company

Director of User Experience

As a member of the Creative Leadership team I helped product teams iterate on fun game and social mechanics, worked them into easy to understand and engaging core loops, and designed play session experiences that introduced our games to millions of people and kept them coming back for more.

Zynga

Provided usability and playability consulting on a variety of Zynga’s franchises, including FrontierVille and Mafia Wars. Ensured these games shipped with discoverable, usable, social, and fun core mechanics from D1 to D365 and beyond.

Senior User Researcher

Helped clients make their games and social applications more approachable, social, engaging, effective, and fun. Covered the entire user experience flow from content discovery through trial version, conversion pipeline, and community and social sharing tools.

Initial Experience Consulting

Founder and Principal Game & UX Consultant

Ensured features that drove community activity and sharing were approachable and engaging. Improved surfacing and usability of relevant and useful community content to help customers browse, search, and shop with confidence.Collaborated closely with the Personalization, Customer Reviews, Discussion Boards, Video Uploads, Tagging, and Community Pages product teams.

Amazon.com

User Experience Specialist, Social and Community Features

Guided development of Rise of Nations: Thrones & Patriots, Rise of Legends, Catan! from concept through post-release. 

Oversaw production of all areas (art, code, design, quality assurance) and provided UX and game design direction related to core mechanics, controls, feedback, and learn-as-you-play tutorials.

Helped pitch and consult on Kingdoms of Amalur.

Big Huge Games

Game Producer and UX Lead

Provided UX research and design direction on initial experience (first hour of game play), core game play (character, camera, controls, in-game feedback), and tutorial/learn as you play design (making the game accessible to “newbies” without alienating the core gamer). 

Conducted a wide range of user research, including: Rapid iterative usability testing, survey studies, expert review, competitor analysis, deep game play analysis (both instrumented and survey data), prototype analysis, and focus groups. 

Supervised contractors who performed usability studies and survey research.

Microsoft Game Studios

Games Usability and Playability Specialist

Designed user interfaces for Windows and web based data visualization applications.

SPSS, Inc

User Interface Designer

Conducted data quality analysis of extremely large (over 100 million records) databases of live consumer package goods sales data. Responsible for all aspects of sampling, modeling, and report writing.

Research Analyst

Collaborated on a series of survey research studies on how judges, juries, and scientists interact within the legal system. Responsible for designing the studies, analyzing the data, and reporting key findings at national and international conferences and in book chapters and journal publications. 

Supervised graduate and undergraduate student research teams.

Jason Schklar 🔜 XDS