I got paid to find out what annoys people

My first job in tech had nothing to do with marketing. I was paid to break things.

In January 2014, while finishing my marketing degree, I joined itiw as a part time game analyst. Every student I told thought I had the dream job. Playing mobile games before anyone else? Sign me up. The reality was a bit less glamorous. My job was to find every moment a player might get confused, stuck or bored, and write it down before the game reached real people.

The problem. Developers know their own game too well. They know where every button is and what every icon means, so they stop seeing the problems. Players don’t have that luxury. A bug nobody spots turns into a one star review on launch day, and a confusing screen quietly turns into an uninstall.

What I did.

• Beta tested iOS and Android games before launch, looking for bugs and anything that made a game harder to use.

• Wrote up every error and user experience problem so the developers could recreate it and fix it.

• Gave proper, structured feedback. “This feels weird” doesn’t help anyone.

• Oversaw the move of the studio’s top five games from iOS to Android.

What happened. Games went out with fewer problems, and five of the studio’s best games reached a whole new audience on Android. The best compliment a tester gets is silence, because nobody notices the problems that never shipped.

What I took from it. Every bit of friction costs you a user. I still think about marketing this way. Before I ask how to get more attention, I ask what is stopping the people who are already interested.