Emma Varjo

I’m an accomplished user experience leader, with a decade in commercial video game and digital product development. Passionate about experiences, I’m equally proud of the experiences I’ve crafted for players in beloved games such as Nine Parchments, Trine 4, and Starbase, as well as the developer experiences I’ve helped shape through UI pipelines and style guides, to modernized, timely, and effective research methods and teams, to inclusive and positive company cultures where knowledge sharing, transparency, and camaraderie are the norm.

As a child, I loved playing video games and wanted to make them when I grew up. This led me to study software engineering at University, where I stumbled upon Human Computer Interactions, which completely blew my mind and UX became my grown-up dream job. After several years working in software engineering, software integration, and robotic process automation, I found a way to fulfill both dreams and became a game UX designer and researcher.

Over the years I’ve had the pleasure to work as an individual contributor and team lead in both game and tools teams, led feature design efforts, give guidance on overall player experience to teams of various sizes, and help shape company cultures to be open, positive, and inclusive.

I’m a keen believer in community and sharing knowledge and do so by running and speaking at conferences and events, actively participating in numerous game and UX related communities, as well as write and create graphics for @expquest account on Instagram.