Hi, I'm Chris. Welcome to my portfolio!

I recently finished my Ph.D. studying engineering psychology at Oregon State University and now work for Riot Games. Prior to this I worked as a user experience researcher for Blizzard Entertainment. My research interests include visual attention, working memory, individual differences, and how we can apply what we learn from cognitive psychology to real world products and designs.

Email: ChristopherJHauck@Gmail.com

World of Warcraft In-Game Support Redesign

Blizzard's MMO video game World of Warcraft included a customer support site that was specific to and accessible inside the games interface. The purpose of this project was to redesign this support experience, providing players with an updated design that was more catered to common problems and issues players faced while playing the game.

World of Warcraft Game Playtest

While working at Blizzard I had the opportunity to support our Games User Research team. In doing so, I gained experience in conducting playtests on products that were currently in development to collect early player feedback on developer designs.

Diablo Immortal Mobile Support

With the development of the mobile title Diablo Immortal, our team needed to create our first mobile support experience that could be used by players while in the game. This project discusses our process in developing our first mobile game support site and what we learned in the process.

Blizzard Support Site Survey

Not all players who use Blizzard's customer support site contact support, and our team did not have the ability to gather feedback from those that visited our site and left without contacting. This project explored the implementation of a feedback tab on the Blizzard support site with the goal of collecting feedback from players who would otherwise would not talk to our support staff.

Selected Publications

Burgess, E., Hauck, C., De Pooter, E. et al. Do salient abrupt onsets trigger suppression?. Atten Percept Psychophys (2022). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-022-02578-0 [Article Link]
Hauck, C., & Lien, M.-C. (2022). The role of visual working memory capacity in attention capture among video game players. Psychological research, 10.1007/s00426-021-01640-0. Advance online publication. [Article Link]
Lien, M.-C., Ruthruff, E., & Hauck, C. (2021). On preventing attention capture: Is singleton suppression actually singleton suppression?. Psychological research, 10.1007/s00426-021-01599-y. Advance online publication. [Article Link]
Ruthruff, E., Hauck, C., & Lien, M. C. (2021). What do we know about suppression of attention capture?. Visual Cognition, 29(9), 604-607. [Article Link]