Hello , I’m Rich Ridlen, welcome.

By day, I’m a user experience researcher whose career has primarily focused on entertainment tech and that mostly in video games.

By night, I’m a story writer, cook, dad, husband, and horror and tattoo enthusiast.

I live in San Francisco.

Electronic Arts

Dynata

YouTiube

Electronic Arts

Oculus|Meta

My career has mainly centered around entertainment tech.

EA: My first spin there was focused on market research and lots of surveys. My passion being UXR, I attempted to start a UXR effort, but to no avail

A few years later they hired me back to bring a UXR org to fruition. I designed and built out two labs, developed research protocols, grew out a recruiting/ops team, etc.

Dynata: Lots of surveys: design, programming, and fielding. Great people there.

YouTube: Sole researcher on both YouTube Music and YouTube VR and launched them both. Cut me teeth on crazy insight evangelization there. The VR and games experiences, led me to the next gig

Oculus | Meta: I again had the opportunity to build out a games UXR org. It went from just me to 2 FTEs and 4 contractors. 100% remote which enabled nationwide recruiting and global studio reach. We helped improve dozens of titles.

My history, my skills, and my loves.

I’ve been in tech for over 20 years. While most of my career has focused on video games, music and VR, a chunk of it was also focused on market and brand research and surveys.

You can check out my LinkedIn for more granular info.

Essentially, I’m mixed methods, leaning qualitative, and on the latter side, I’ve executed pretty much every methodology under the sun. On the quantitative side, I can write solid surveys, perform basic statistical analysis, and effectively work with data scientists.

I’m a big fan of longitudinals, both in work and in my life. I’ve conducted one week, four week, and 36 week longitudinal studies and have gotten pretty good at over the last ten plus years. I’m more than happy to chat about the professional ones and you can check out the Dead by Daylight longitudinal I did for fun.

Currently, I’m doing contract work in the mobile games space and pro bono UXR for small game studios who need the research, but can’t afford it.

I cook, make boardgames, write stories, ride rollercoasters, play video games, shoot and edit videos, watch movies (love me some horror), play with my dogs and cat, and explore my city. But mainly, I just like to hang out with my wife and my kid—-they’re really all I care about.

If you’d like to connect about contract, pro bono, or full time work, please get in touch.