In your new role as Technical Director [of UI Technology], do you have a sense yet of what the new responsibilities are going to be?
TL;DRThe role is currently about tooling: making UI tools friendlier to designers and artists rather than only very technical people, so more of a large team can build UI and work faster.
So it's really about tooling at the moment. We do have tools for making the UI, but they're not very user friendly. The two guys previously would definitely attest to this. So we want something that's definitely more designer friendly, definitely more artistically friendly as well. And it's a complicated business, because Chris is really into very 3D UIs, and we've all seen the stuff that Zane produces, which is awesome, but he's extremely technical. And what we want to do is lower the bar so we don't need extremely technical people. Anyone can pick it up and make cool-looking stuff. You still need artistic ability and to understand UX, but at the same time we want to make this really achievable for the broad range of designers and artists.
When we say we want to make it more broadly available, that is because we are, as a company, as a team, fast approaching, if not over, a thousand people, with lots of developers, all with varying levels of technical abilities. If everybody could program UI, everybody would. So making these things accessible is super important. It's not about, well, let's not hire people who aren't technically proficient. You hire people who have their proficiency here and here and here, but you want to build a thing that doesn't require them to also have a UI programming proficiency, so that you can spread this out. That's how we hit this at scale.
But also just do stuff quicker. If you can try stuff out and go, hmm, I'm not quite so sure, try some other things out, and you're not struggling with the tools, you're not struggling to author stuff, and you just go, here are some things. Right, yeah, that really suits my feature. You can move on really quickly. You can produce more work if you've got better tools. It's like trying to build a house with a tiny trowel or something. No, you want some heavy machinery that can build this stuff together. So the better the tools, the better people can work, and it frees them up to do more creative stuff rather than just screaming at their computers going, these damn Building Blocks.