Let's create a great experience for your players
Margaret Alés Cowley
Associate Game UX Director
Hello, I’m Margaret.
An experienced UX Designer with over 20 years of experience in games, web and virtual reality. I have love for tackling complex challenges and I deeply believe in collaboration between UX and Game Design to leverage the best of each expertise.
Associate UX Director at Ubisoft Montreal
As Associate UX Director at Ubisoft, I’ve been learning and refining my leadership skills, supporting and empowering designers to achieve ambitious goals maximizing their potential to achieve the best results together.
My background in visual design and web integration has allowed me to contribute to a diverse range of projects across Web Games, Web Design, Virtual Reality, and PC & Console video-games, blending creativity with UX methodologies.
I love combining creativity with functionality, both grounded in principles of inclusive design. This drives me to apply rigorous attention to user research methodologies, accessibility by design and configurable accessibility features.
Whether it’s defining UX questions driven by the scope of the creative direction, designing and prototyping intuitive interfaces, mentoring individuals, giving talks about UX, leading and supporting accessibility, participating into user research, I take a hands-on, holistic approach to every game project.
My visual work on my portfolio fuses clean and minimalist aesthetics with calm and colourful elements, while my photography captures the inspiring cities that are part of my life.
My two mottos at work…
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Work in a positive way
I create a culture of honesty, respect and positive leadership, rooted with my principles of empathy and emotional intelligence.
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Test and learn
Fail early and learn fast! Even for AAA games it is applicable, and it should be. I am always driven by how interaction takes place between players and the system.
Recommendations
Fabiano Vassão
Lead Artist at Blizzard
I had the pleasure of working with Margaret on the UX team for Assassin’s Creed Mirage. Margaret’s commitment and agility in prototyping complex features were truly remarkable.
Her ability to swiftly transform challenging concepts into intuitive user experiences greatly contributed to the success of our project.
Her collaborative spirit and proactive approach made her an invaluable team member.
Watching her grow into the role of UX Director has been a natural and well-deserved progression, a testament to her exceptional competence and dedication.
We share the same vision for how both UI and UX must evolve and be integrated within video games, maximizing the potential of a solid Design System.
Working alongside her was a great experience.
Antony Marques
Lead UX/UI Designer at Couch Heroes
I had the pleasure to work with Margaret in AC:Mirage. She’s an experienced designer in tackling UX problematics of all kinds – The prototypes and wireframes were top-notch!
Her approach is professional, structured and methodical, she always tries to make her decisions based on UX research and not letting our inner biases mislead us.
Margaret seamlessly integrated into our UX process while making suggestions despite joining later. Her commitment to accessibility and UX writing is clear, and you can see is something truly valuable to her.
Beyond her professional skills, Margaret’s kindness made collaboration enjoyable. I’ll miss our debates on UX decisions and the challenges we faced throughout the project.
I can’t wait to work with Margaret in the future, those currently working with her are lucky!
David Elahee
Founder and Game designer at Headbang Club
Margaret is exactly the kind of person one needs in any professional team.
Skilled, passionate, friendly, devoured with the love of well done work.
During our work on Mush, she was always there and kept pushing forward to make such a wide game, despite the tempests and over the cracks and beyond reason.
All that positive energy and hard working in such a person deserve your attention.
Clara Toussaint
UX/UI Designer at French National Research Center
Margaret is a true expert and an exceptional mentor.
She is both highly skilled in her UX work by testing her designs against different studies and feedbacks from others, innovating and testing new ideas and training on new softwares to be ever more independent.
But she is also a very educational person who takes the time to explain and give feedbacks to help others improve. She is a very human person with whom I loved to work and who knows how to create a climate of respect and trust in her environment.