Come to GDC 2017 and hone your design skills at the all-new UX Summit!

The 2017 Game Developers Conference is just weeks away, so today organizers want to quickly let you know about some of the great UI/UX design talks taking place during the conference!

Each of these talks is part of the all-new GDC UX Summit, one of eight that will take place Monday, February 27th and Tuesday, February 28th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA -- the first two days of the conference.

These Summit talks are great because they're hyper-focused on one specific area of game design. For example, in his GDC 2017 UX Summit talk "From Rational to Emotional: Designs that Increase Player Retention", longtime Epic Games staffer Jim Brown aims to dissect the basic emotions that drive everyone, and provide specific examples of design techniques that encourage the formation of enduring emotional ties that could enhance both retention and enjoyment for players.

Brown is adamant that this will not be a talk about narrative design or "how to make people cry", but an evaluation of the underlying factors that can create emotional attachment, and how to encourage those connections in games with focused design and UX techniques.

Plus, Electronic Arts' Paul Rybicki -- a veteran game maker -- will be sharing some critical design wisdom in his UX Summit talk on "UX Methodologies for Holistic Product Design." 

This talk will focus on best practice methods for creating design deliverables which are readily digestible to other disciplines, thereby increasing product development velocity. If you attend you'll learn how to make your UX designs more holistic and repeatedly referenced, so you can spend more time iterating and revising in each sprint, while still keeping stakeholders from engineering, product or game design well informed of the current design direction and the game's design as a whole.

And in his UX Summit talk on "Throwing out the Dopamine Shots: Reward Psychology Without the Neurotrash", Epic's Ben-Lewis Evans aims to dispel the neuromyths around dopamine and focus on the psychology behind reward systems in game design.

He'll break down lots of cool stuff, including basic reward principles, cognitive biases that impact reward perception, as well as the importance of progression, control, social interaction, expectation, and the vital role of feedback and UX when designing effective rewards.

This is worth paying attention to if you make games, because when it comes to designing an effective reward, if players like it, have learned how to get it, or are motivated to get it can be different outcomes. Find out why, and why it matters, by attending this talk!

So make room for this in your GDC schedule, because you'll walk away with a better understanding of your design strengths and an understanding of player-oriented design methods that can be integrated into your existing workflows to provide more visibility and value to UX design across the team.

For more details on this and other talks taking place at GDC 2017, head over to the conference Session Scheduler. For more information on GDC 2017, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas