About me
I am a needs-focused user researcher that loves helping teams build products that impact people's lives in a positive way.
I came to UX research via games. After graduate school, I worked as a producer at the Pogo.com casual game web portal. I left EA in 2011 to work on an alternative gaming platform called Sifteo Cubes. Having prior experience teaching children of all ages, I was asked to build a playtest service at Sifteo that was low cost and focused on testing with children. Despite my title being Game Designer, I found I enjoyed the research work the most. Since then, I have focused on making UX research the focus of my career.
My research has informed casual web games, mobile games, children's interactive products, healthcare behavior change applications, fintech (crypto), design systems, and internal developer tools experience. My passion is to lay the foundation of expert UX research teams and services by delivering insights myself while simultaneously building out the research function from operations to mentorship.
Skills:
User Interviews
Deep Listening
Focus Groups
Concept Testing
Survey Writing and Analysis
Usability
Playtesting
Sketching
Mind maps, user journeys
Prototype testing
Remote User Research
Study Recruitment
Research Roadmaps
Project Management
Tools:
User Interviews (the platform)
Mural
Playtest Cloud
Asana
Monday dot com
Excel
Looker
Tableau
Figma
Speaking and Publications:
Prior to 2012 as Sarah Hatton
Blog Posts
Contributing Author at https://blog.playtestcloud.com/
Speaking
Game Developers Conference 2019 Research Methods to Improve Live Game Retention
gamesUR summit 2018 Your Survey Sucks: Exposing Truths to Mobile Game Dev Teams through Better Quant
gamesUR summit 2016 Success Factors as Communication Tools in Mobile
Game Design Conference 2012 Games User Research is for Game Design
Book Chapter
S. Hatton, M. McGurgan, XJ Wang. Using Sound Maps in Multimodal Environments to Promote Interactive Narrative. presented at the Narrative and Multimodality Conference at UCE Birmingham, Birmingham, UK. April 27-28, 2007. in New Perspectives On Narrative and Multimodality ed by Ruth Page, Routledge, 2009.
Papers and Presentations
Sarah Hatton, Ellen Campana, Andreea Danielescu, and David Birchfield. 2009. Stratification: embodied poetry works by high school students. In Proceedings of the seventh ACM conference on Creativity and cognition (C&C ’09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 463-464. DOI=10.1145/1640233.1640355 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1640233.1640355
Birchfield, D., Thornburg, H., Megowan-Romanowicz, C., Hatton, S., Mechtley, B., Dolgov, I., Burleson, W., Embodiment, Multimodality, and Composition: Convergent Themes Across HCI and Education for Mixed-Reality Learning Environments, Journal of Advances in Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 2008, Article ID 874563.
D. Birchfield, B. Mechtley, S. Hatton, H. Thornburg, Mixed-Reality Learning in the Art Museum Context, in Proceedings of ACM SIG Multimedia, Vancouver, BC, October 27, 2008.
S. Hatton, D. Birchfield, M.C. Megowan, Learning Metaphor through Mixed-Reality Game Design and Game Play, in Proceedings of ACM Sandbox Conference, Los Angeles, CA, August 10, 2008.
S. Hatton. Hybrid Media Environment Storytelling Tasks that Encourage Reflection: The Story Map and The Metaphor Game. poster and demo presented at the CreativeIT workshop sponsored by the NSF CISE Directorate, Arizona State University, January 18-20, 2008
A. Cuthbertson, S. Hatton, G. Minyard, H. Piver, C. Todd, D. Birchfield, Mediated Education in a Creative Arts Context: Research and Practice at Whittier Elementary School, in Proceedings of Interational Conference on Interaction Design and Children, Aalborg, Denmark, June 6-8, 2007
S. Hatton, D. Birchfield, Creating Student-Authored Games in Hybrid Media Environments: Realizing Embodiment and Aesthetic, presented at iDMAa 2007: Beyond Boundaries, Philadelphia, Nov 10-11