Hi, I'm Anya Osborne
Welcome to my portfolio!
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I’m a UX designer & design researcher with over ten years of experience in the games industry. I'm presently pursuing a Ph.D. program in Computational Media at the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz while searching for new exciting ventures and professional collaborations in academia and industry to advance UX and design practices among multiplayer games and social VR experiences.
With BS and MS degrees in Psychology, and MA degree in Human Computer Interaction and Game Design, I thrive most with dedicated and creative teams who want to create new, cutting-edge user experiences that bring more fun to the future of gaming and are passionate about building immersive multi-user digital worlds from concept to final shipment.
Game Designer Anya Osborne
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Social VR Research
Social Emotional Technology Lab - UCSC, CA
2018 - Present
Primary Role -
Lead Design Researcher
This project explores building social VR technology to improve networked meetings. VR shows promise as a technology for supporting remote meetings in new ways because it puts team members in a shared media space, which allows for familiar communication tactics. This project focuses on design and development of social VR tools to improve face-to-face meetings by helping participants time manage, come to decisions, stick to an agenda, and achieve social connection and support for ideas. These innovations seek to make online meetings more effective and satisfying.
Game Designer Anya Osborne
World Of Riders: VR Exergame
Exergame Lab - MSU, East Lansing, MI
2015 - 2016
Game Designer
Primary Role -
World of Riders is my MA thesis project in serious game design,created in a team of two students, where I led the design process. This project was showcased in CHI Play and Meaningful Play conferences in 2016. It is an online multiplayer first-person exergame developed for mobile (iOS, Android) and virtual reality (Gear VR) platforms. Players compete and cooperate with other players to defeat the boss while completing their regular exercise routines on stationary cycle trainers. The gameplay is designed to simulate High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) and support people's exercising routines.
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Game Designer Anya Osborne
Game Designer Anya Osborne
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Dreamy Food
2020
Primary Role -
Trained Food Classifier
Dreamy Food is a class project developed in a group of three students. The goal was to develop artifacts that appreciate art. Dreamy Food is based on the trained Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) of World of Warcraft (WoW) icons that generates new stylized art using the Google Deep Dream algorithm and Gradient Ascent. We then used a trained food classifier using the Inception V3 model and applied it to classify the resulting Deep Dreamed images of WoW art. The project shows that our algorithm can be employed for creating stylized images that can be viewed by the machine as food.
Game Designer Anya Osborne
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Call Of Duty Black Ops IIII
Treyarch Corp. / Activision Blizzard, Santa Monica, CA
2017
Role -
Systems Design Intern
Call Of Duty Black Ops 4 is a multiplayer first-person shooter, the first title released without a traditional single-player campaign mode. The multiplayer mode was the first in the series to not feature automatic health regeneration and introduced both predictive recoil and a new ballistics system. I was a System and UX Design Intern on this title. I translated game systems and gameplay user experience goals into intuitive UI to support and enhance the game's multiplayer experience. I designed game systems, conceptual wireframes, user flow diagrams, and low fidelity prototypes to communicate design concepts for further discussions and playtests purposes.
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Manu Video Game Maker
MANU, Moscow, Russia
2020 – 2021
UX Researcher and Product Designer
Role -
MANU is a game engine software designed for people who want to create games with little coding experience. In MANU, I managed and conducted user research and usability tests, planned and implemented user research strategy and methods, led remote user recruitment activities. I worked closely with marketing and product teams to identify research topics. I performed task analysis, qualitative and quantitative analysis using SPSS. I translated research findings into actionable recommendations and assisted with product design by creating software UX/UI wireframes, mock-ups and prototypes using Figma.
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Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab - East Lansing, MI
Saving Draggy
2015 - 2016
Role -
Game and UX Designer
Saving Draggy is a mobile third person adventure game for young children with lessons about financial literacy. A player is a wizard apprentice who goes on an adventure to save their missing friend (a baby dragon) by completing mini-games with both educational and entertainment content. My role on this project was to design a single player experience. In applying the research on children's stages for cognitive development, I designed the mini-games system, progression and wireframed the game flow. I also assisted with the design of user interface and narrative.
Game Design Class Project - MSU, East Lansing, MI
2016
Primary Role -
Game and UI Designer
DROp. is an Oculus Rift SDK I - powered, first person immersive space walk experience. Player explores asteroid fields and space wreckage in search of salvageable materials. Player’s main objective is to remove the debris by detonating a bomb. DROp was developed in a team of 6 people, where my primary role was designing and employing user interface for VR in Unity, as well as milestone planning, and facilitating the communication among team members.
Project Manager is Anya Osborne
Debris Removal Operation in VR
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Love Quest: Board Game
2 Persons Class Project - MSU, East Lansing, MI
2015
Primary Role -
Game System Designer
Love quest is a trivia based board game designed for couples. A player and his/her partner answers questions about each other to score points and move through five levels. A palyer and his/her partner needs to work together against the game. The objective is to raise the most points possible by the end of the game. It’s an ideal game for couples trying to go down the memory lane, couples wanting to learn more about each other, or need a good way to break the ice. I prototyped the game using the results of our design research study with people who were in romantic relationships.
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Lady Popular Fashion Arena
Playvision, Ltd. - St. Petersburg, Russia
2014 - 2013
Primary Role -
Game Producer
Lady Popular is a browser-based, free-to-play, online multiplayer fashion game developed by the Bulgarian software company XS Software. In August 2012 Lady Popular Fashion Arena was released. Lady Popular is a casual dress-up game that aims primarily at a female audience. Lady Popular has been translated into 21 languages and has over 8 million registered users. At Playvision Ltd. my role was to manage the process of publishing and launching the game for the Russian-speaking consumer market.
Mushroom Wars is a fast-paced, accessible single and multiplayer RTS game with a quaint visual style that brings skirmish gameplay to the forefront. Battles of opposing tribes of Mushroom armies take place in close-quarters maps using simple, straight-forward controls against AI or friends. It is one of my favorite projects I worked on. My role was an Associate Producer, I prepared localization kits, coordinated work of 8 game language translations, help communications with publishing companies. I also conducted user research studies for further design and development of in-game events.
Primary Role -
2013
Creat Studios, Inc. - St. Petersburg, Russia
Mushroom Wars
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Associate Producer
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Nitro Nation: Drag Racing
Creative Mobile, OU - Tallinn, Estonia
2013
Role -
UX Researcher and Designer
Drag Racing Nitro Nation 3D is a mobile game with very addictive mechanics. Players can play in the campaign mode or race against each other online in real time. My role on this project was to conduct user research study in order to identify the most attractive profiles of game's character to the game's target audience. Based on the results of the study, I developed psychological portraits for game's characters with reference pictures to be used as guidelines for character artists and designers.
Skills
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Game Platforms: Consoles, Web, Mobile, PC, Oculus Rift, Gear VR, HTC Vive, Microsoft HoloLens.
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Social VR Platfroms: Spatial, Glue, MeetinVR, Mozilla Hubs, VRChat, AltspaceVR, Rec Room, Facebook Horizon, High Fidelity, Anyland.
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Programming (limited): Java, JavaScript, Python, HTML, C#
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Web and Graphic Design: Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Creative Cloud), Figma, Sketch, InVision, Balsamiq Mockups, WordPress.
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Game Development: Unity, Knowledge of Unreal, Game Maker Studio, Godot, Buildbox, Roblox, Dreams (PS4).
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Software: MS Office, Qualtrics, Mailchimp, Knowledge of SPSS and statistical software.
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Productivity and Communication: Microsoft Visio, Outlook, Notion, P4 (Perforce), Hansoft, JIRA, Basecamp, Trello, SCRUM, Slack.
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Research Methods: Playtests, Research through Design, Heuristics, Focus Groups, In-depth Interviews, Diary methods, Surveys, Ethnography, Cards Selection, Task Analysis, Technology Probes, Theories from psychology for User Profiles.
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Languages: English (fluent), Russian (native).
Awards
CHI PLAY Student Game Design Competition Certificate for (Samsung Gear VR), Austin, TX, USA, 2016
International Game Developers Association (IGDA) scholar at GDC, 2016
Muskie Summer Internship scholar, USA, 2016
Outstanding MA Student Leader Award, 2016
Fulbright student scholar, USA, 2014 – 2016
MI MA Academic Merit Award, Michigan State University, USA, 2015
Young Professionals in Foreign Policy Award, USA, 2012
Centre for German and European Studies Award in St. Petersburg, Russia, 2010
DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship, 2010
Publications
Jialang Victor Li, Max Kreminski, Sean M Fernandes, Anya Osborne, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, and Katherine Isbister. 2022
Conversation Balance: A Shared VR Visualization to Support Turn-taking in Meetings
In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI EA '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 181, 1–4.
Katherine Isbister, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Anya Osborne, and Jialang Victor Li. 2022
Augmenting Social Presence in VR Meetings
In Social Presence Workshop at the 2022 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '22), New Orleans, LA, USA, 1-4
Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Anya Osborne, Max Kreminski, Sean Fernandes, Sabrina Fielder, Victor Li, and Katherine Isbister. 2021
Social Superpowers in Social VR
In Social VR: A New Medium for Remote Communication & Collaboration 2021 Workshop in 2021 ACM CHI Virtual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: 1–5.
Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Anya Osborne, and Katherine Isbister. 2019
Shaping Pro-Social Interaction in VR: An Emerging Design Framework
In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 564, 12 pages
Anya Osborne, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, and Katherine Isbister. 2019
Understanding Emerging Design Practices for Avatar Systems in the Commercial Social VR Ecology
In Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 241-252
Chandranil Chakraborttii and Anya Osborne. 2022
Characterizing Surprising Reactions of Players in 2D Platform Games
In Entertainment Computing, 2022
Lucas Martins de Souza, Irem Gokce Yildirim, Anya Osborne, and Taiwoo Park. 2016
World Of Riders: Exercising is Fun
In Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts (CHI PLAY Companion '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 55-60
My Professional Journey
I received my BS and MS in psychology to better analyze human behavior, cognitive responses, and effects on user experiences within online virtual worlds. I practiced this knowledge at multiple game studios around the world. From working at Creat Studios, one of Russia’s leading publishers and developers of online, handled and console games, to Creative Mobile, the largest mobile game developer in Estonia; from conducting user research studies for the world’s biggest gaming site for children, Moshi Monsters at Mind Candy, Ltd. in London, UK, to producing my first FTP MMO game at Playvision Ltd. in St.Petersburg.
My professional interests and passion for interactive media granted me a Fulbright scholarship to pursue a Master of Arts degree in HCI and Game Design at Michigan State University and the opportunity to create user experiences for VR platforms. Upon my graduation from Michigan State, I moved to Los Angeles to continue my career in games and digital entertainment.
I want to apply my knowledge in creating new, unique, and immersive experiences. I also want to see these interactive systems successfully operate in real life and observe people appreciating them. I thrive most within teams of creative and dedicated people, I believe games and other computer-driven experiences are a medium to create positive emotions and feelings of social connection.
