ROB DIAZ

HI-REZ STUDIOS

Lead UI / UX Designer | robdiaz@reduiux.com | www.reduiux.com

  • Partnered with leadership and stakeholders to determine SMITE 2’s business goals, and vertical slice development for the SMITE 2 announcement at SMITE World Championship.

  • Collaborated with Directors, Leads, and senior Leadership to identify their vision for features, while ensuring designs centered on the User.

  • Established a newUI/UX direction pillars for the SMITE 2 team.

  • Served as the sole UI/UX Designer for 4 months, establishing processes and scheduling.

  • Became the primary UX Designer as the team expanded, mentoring UI & UX Designers alike to enhance their skill sets, and further expand their knowledge on UI/UX design.

  • Developed user journeys, user stories, ux architecture, UX flows, wireframes, prototypes, functionality expectations, motion mocks, and high-fidelity mocks of many in-game and out of game experiences.

  • Introduced usability tests to the studio, a new approach that truly focused on user-centric design, and championing the value of UX design.

  • Determined the visual and thematic direction, and heavily contributed to creation of our UI Style Guide.

  • Designed, presented and implemented new user experiences with engineering, and UI designers to leadership.

  • Collaborated with engineering, and designed a suite of Accessibility improvements, and new features so the title was accessible to the community.

  • Designed and presented an improved, and modernized First-Time User Experience, with tutorial concepts for players of all skill levels using data from leadership, content creators, and internal discussions.

  • Collaborated with community content creators, and alpha testers with interviews and usability testing.

  • Collaborated with User Acquisitions team to create several new UI/UX surveys to gather critical data to support the development team in identifying critical pain points, and motivations to inform our approach and designs.

  • Collaborated with engineering and Localization to develop a new standard for the team when creating content.
    Provided creative direction for third-party vendors to enhance UI elements.

EA SPORTS

Live Services UX Design Lead - MADDEN NFL 23
8/2022 - 2/2023

  • Led the redesign of the initial UI/UX design for Madden Ultimate Team (MUT), with a heavy focus on new user experiences, and future-proofing the experiences for incremental and annual updates.

  • Collaborated extensively with stakeholders, designers, and visual partner teams to define MUT’s core business goals, and needs to ensure these goals are presented in our functional designs.

  • Worked closely with the lead designer and UXR team in developing several usability test and interviews to gather critical data that helped shape the experience for MUT’s UI/UX.

  • Developed a community-driven design approach, aligning features with player feedback and preferences.

  • Streamlined our design process to include animation, audio, and haptic feedback teams during wireframing to identify their assistance in creating invisible UX experiences.

  • Worked closed with stakeholders during live wireframing sessions to visualize their concepts of many designs and experiences for documentation and initial wireframing steps.

  • Developed wireframes, prototypes, high-fidelity mocks, animations, component design and presentation of designs.

EA SPORTS

Live Services Art Lead - MADDEN NFL 23
3/2020 - 2/2023

  • Managed and built a team of 10 artists, including the hiring and training of 5 new artists. In this role I oversaw their career development, skill enrichment, and project contributions, in which we fostered a supportive team environment, prioritizing coaching and mentorship, visibility, and growth for all team members of varying career experience.

  • Worked with development managers and producers to schedule content releases, artist contributions and estimates.

  • Coordinated multi-disciplinary teams and external partners to improve communication, identify art dependencies, and align delivery timelines, ensuring any teams depending on our artists were able to complete their project milestones.

  • Partnered with the Content team to identify the deliverables for each program, identify risks, and determine the delivery dates of all assets to ensure proper testing could be achieved.

  • Determined the visual and thematic direction for Madden Ultimate Team’s seasonal programs, reaching a final delivery of over 210 programs across three years

  • Oversaw the delivery of art assets of all programs, provided critical feedback, and ensured all needs from content producers were met.

  • Served as the lead outsource designer for a third-party vendors each year to complete the overall look and feel of MUT.

  • For my efforts, I was recognized with a Sharkie award for Outstanding Achievement in Art, highlighting my contributions as the team’s lead, promoting a culture of collaboration, accountability, and encouragement, resulting in a high-performing art team. The Sharkie is an award, unique to EA Tiburon, meant to recognize deserving members for their contributions as voted on by members of the studio.

EA SPORTS

Experience Designer 1 - NBA LIVE 15-20
8/2014 - 2/2019

  • Promoted multiple times on NBA LIVE, listed below are some milestones and key accomplishments.

  • Designed a development tool that streamlined asset creation for in-game advertisements, reducing production time by 70% and enabling the live services art team to create more elaborate visuals. Presented the tool to EA SPORTS executives, leading to its adoption discussions with Madden NFL, UFC, and FIFA teams.

  • Co-developed UI Style Guides, aligning with Senior Artist and UX Director guidelines for cohesive visuals.

  • Streamlined communication by leading meetings with leadership, stakeholders, and cross-functional teams.

  • Collaborated with UXR on testing new flows and prototypes, iterating designs based on real-time feedback.

  • Led UI/UX design for multiple features, including UI concepting, UX architecture, User journeys, wireframes, functional prototypes, motion mocks, and high-fidelity mocks.

  • Sole designer for the NBA LIVE 20 Companion App, collaborating with a lean team of 2 engineers to enhance existing features and design new ones, including the integration of AR technology.

  • Trained, and mentored junior designers, and artists for the NBA LIVE UI/UX team, and live service department.

  • Collaborated with other EA SPORTS titles for cross-IP innovation and improvements.

  • Directed third-party vendors with visual and functional design feedback to maintain quality standards.
    Conducted interviews and art tests to support team growth and onboarding for Live Services.

  • Google Apps

  • MS Office

  • Axure

  • Confluence

  • Perforce

  • Hansoft

  • Interaction Design

  • Prototyping

  • Research

  • Risk Management

  • Survey Analysis

  • Survey Creation

  • Usability Design

  • JIRA

  • MIRO

  • Slack

  • Trello

  • Usability Interviews

  • Usability Testing

  • User Flows

  • User Journeys

  • UX Architectures

  • Visual Design

  • Wireframes

A UI / UX Designer, Design Manager, and Graphic Designer with over 15 years experience leading teams, building detailed user experiences and interactions, and championing a supportive work culture. Over the past decade, I've had the pleasure of collaborating on titles such as Madden NFL, NBA Live and SMITE 2, as well as consulting on countless others. Utilizing up to date UI and UX best practices presented through studies, surveys, presentations and literature. I'm passionate about understanding what drives users for each product and feature, solving complex problems and maximizing the use of user research in all designs.

EXPERIENCE

Advanced UI Designer - SMITE 2
2/2023 - 8/2024

TOOLS

  • Figma

  • Adobe XD

  • Photoshop

  • Illustrator

  • After Effects

  • Unreal Engine 5

SKILLS

  • Agile

  • Bilingual (English and Spanish)

  • Component Design

  • Critical Thinking

  • Functionality Design

  • Graphic Design

  • Information Architecture