Founder, Ronin User Experience
Greater Seattle Area
- Current
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- Founder at Ronin User Experience
- Past
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- Game Designer at FASA (Microsoft Game Studios)
- User Experience Manager at Microsoft
- Usability Engineer at Microsoft
- Education
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- University of Washington
- Claremont McKenna College
- Recommended
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4 people have recommended Bill - Connections
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368
connections
- Industry
- Computer Software
- Websites
Bill Fulton’s Summary
I'm a user-experience expert who has been focused on the games industry since 1997. My graduate training in quantitative and social psychology serves as a strong foundation for both sides of user-experience user-research and design.
User-research
I started and led the User-Research program at Microsoft Game Studios for 7 years, and spurred the games industry to start adopting more formal research methods. My former group's pioneering work on Halo 3 was profiled in Wired magazine (http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/15-09/ff_halo).
Design
I do user-interaction/interface design, and social design. The goal of social design is to improve the social fun between players in a multiplayer game experience. My background in social psychology helped me design the social features Shadowrun so that it facilitated a substantially more enjoyable social environment than is found in most shooters on Xbox Live. I'll be speaking at ION 2008 conference (Seattle, May 13-15) about the gaming industry's need for social design.
Bill Fulton’s Specialties:
Developing a user-research program; managing multi-tier organizations; game design with an emphasis on aspects of satisfying social play; user-interaction & interface design (PC & Xbox 360).
Bill Fulton’s Experience
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Founder
Ronin User Experience
(Privately Held; Computer Software industry)
January 2008 — Present (1 year 7 months)
Ronin is a design and user-research consultancy whose mission is to help our clients create exceptional user-experiences.
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Game Designer
FASA (Microsoft Game Studios)
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; MSFT; Computer Software industry)
April 2004 — August 2007 (3 years 5 months)
Responsible for the UI and social design on Shadowrun, a cross-platform multiplayer-centric shooter. Specifically, I worked on the:
* matchmaking system
* economy & stats system
* user-interface
* data logging, mining & analysis -
User Experience Manager
Microsoft
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; MSFT; Computer Games industry)
February 1998 — April 2004 (6 years 3 months)
Started & led Microsoft Game Studio's User-research Group (www.mgsUserResearch.com). This involved:
* Personnel development: trained and developed new hires and managers
* Process development: Adapted research methods from academia & productivity software to the entertainment software industry
* Infrastructure development: designed lab space, developed consumers database, spurred tool development & improvement.
* Staffing: sourced & recruited new talent as we grew from 1 to 30+ members
* Continuity: created a smoother transition to new management for when I left
* Industry leadership: Gave 7 talks at professional conferences. -
Usability Engineer
Microsoft
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; MSFT; Computer Software industry)
August 1996 — February 1998 (1 year 7 months)
I conducted usability research at Microsoft for Netshow (predecessor to Window's Media player) and PC video games.
A typical research project involved:
* Clarifying a product's user-experience goals with the product team
* Evaluating likely areas where the product wasn't meeting those goals.
* Developing a research plan to get feedback from consumers using the product
* Conducting the research with real consumers in a lab setting
* Analyzing the data and providing both written & verbal reports on the findings
* Providing recommendations for product changes based on user-research results:
I also provided recommendations for product changes based on professional opinion as a usability engineer familiar with the target consumer.
Bill Fulton’s Education
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University of Washington
PhC , Psychology , 1992 — 1996
Completed four years of graduate training in the Social Psychology program at the University of Washington. Left to work at Microsoft, one year prior to completing my dissertation.
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Claremont McKenna College
BA (dual) , Psychology & Mathematics , 1988 — 1992
