Sven Uilhoorn

Interaction- and Game Designer | Groningen, the Netherlands
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2019
current

A Piacere

Board game about the era of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with players composing, performing, teaching and spreading rumors to score points, attend royal events and complete their legacies.

Game board with game pieces
2014
current

Compagnieën

Strategic and tactical board game about the Dutch companies during the Dutch Golden Age. Each player controls fleets to compete for the biggest profits, battle victories and settlement control and expansion.

2020

Squash club magazine

Three 80 page magazines a year for a student squash club. They include tournament reports, squash related articles, interviews, quotes from members and pictures from events.

2019

Website squash club

Former website for student squash club, aimed at serving existing members with news, forms and (members-only) photos and documents, while also serving potential members.

Frontpage of the CosyRacingCommunity website, showing the top half of the forum page with the navigation bar and current racing series boards.
2016

Cosy Racing Community

Website and forum for international sim racing community. A highly customised MyBB forum is the home of respectful, low-preparation, friendly but still competitive racing on Assetto Corsa.

Screenshots of the different pages of the Gibu website, both from the mobile and desktop version.
2016

Gibu Bestratingen

For paving company Gibu I designed and developed a website that shows their most relevant projects, explains their strengths, experience and process and let's potential clients get in touch.

View fully functional 2022 Concept

Screenshots of different page types of the Schove Groep websites, both mobile and desktop
2015

Student Housing & Insurance

Two websites aimed at very different demographics. Student housing site serves housing for students and starters. Insurance site provides financial services and insurance aimed at medium income households.

View more projects View upcoming projects

Design Vision

Contrary to most "UX" designers who often mostly rely on quantivative research, I think qualitative research is essential as a cost effective method to design interaction that's based on behaviour. Even low-cost user research through interviews and observation is highly effective for coming up with solutions that are useful and intuitive for the user.

Quantitative research is of course useful to describe trends, differences between groups and demographics. But interaction design is about behaviour. Therefore I think real problems can only be correctly, and more important, with more certainty be indentified, tested and solved by observing real users performing realistic tasks in a natural setting.

I do not believe in Lorem Ipsum neither; design without actual content is nothing more than decoration. Users don't care about decoration or beauty if they can't complete their goals. Beauty can easily lead away from good user experience by letting go of usability standards, quality information architecture and thoughtful interactions.

Books

Especially after my studies I've read a fair amount of books on interaction design and product design. They include Visual Thinking for Design, 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about People, and The Design of Everyday Things on product design.

Game Design books I've read multiple times are The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games and Fundamentals of Game Design.

Tools & Skills

I work daily in software like Photoshop, Illustrator and do front-end stuff regularly. I've built Wordpress themes from scratch and heavily customized a MyBB installation. I am quite familiar with HTML, CSS and (less so) PHP. I usually go for simple and solid solutions and keep away from hacks.

Working in teams of course would mean expanding to tools like Sketch. Luckily I'm a quick learner and enjoy learning something if I will actually use it. So even if I'm not familiar with the tool your team is currently using, I'm quite sure I'll adapt soon enough. Everyone started at zero.

About Me

I play squash, pitch and putt (golf), football, swim and do diving board tricks. Strategy board games like El Grande and Concordia take up most of my Friday and Saturday evenings, aside playing or designing my own board games. Musical interests include jazz, hip-hop, drum and bass, detroit house, world music and electronic.

Since 2009, until 2016 as a team of up to six staff, I run an online simulation racing community. We race every Sunday on Assetto Corsa (PC). I prepare car classes, make car skins, promote and process results. Occasionally I keep members calm and nice.

Since 2017, I give squash training (currently at Sportcentrum Kardinge, Groningen). I'm now able to give training on any level up to my own playing level, and have experience with setting up anything from one hour clinics to year long programmes.

I'm a strong supporter of online privacy and also very cautious of the negative psychological effects of social media, hence you won't find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and alike platforms.

Feel free to contact me if you have a job opportunity that suits me!