Yael Sidler is a UX Designer on Logitech G’s GX team and led both hardware and software user experience design for the PRO X2 SUPERSTRIKE. His interactive media design and technology innovation background combined with his deep passion for gaming shape the deep consideration he applies to his work. Especially with his work on SUPERSTRIKE, he directly interfaced with over 60+ athletes to understand their interactions, performance and needs from technology.

Witnessing how our designs and innovations can directly enhance the performance and experience of esports pros is so interesting to me. As a UX designer, I focus on creating intuitive, ergonomic, and high-performing gaming equipment that is in line and responds directly to their feedback. So getting that right and seeing the immediate results is a great reward.

Seeing SUPERSTRIKE, for example, on esports stages in the hands of the world’s best athletes is crazy to me. Like, they trust the product’s benefits enough to move off their tried-and-true mouse to compete for glory. That’s such a unique aspect of this work that I really hold dear.

The full, collaborative PRO Series product process is just so special. Working through rough prototypes and showing the pros, evolving the design and experience to their feedback and our findings, settling into the final design and then finally holding the finished product, sealed in a box… that’s immensely gratifying.

Pro players are no different from traditional athletes, they’re built differently and are on such high-performing levels in their sport that calling them ‘gamers’ doesn’t feel right to me. We see in the user data we collect, pros use methods & techniques with our products that we couldn't imagine ourselves.

We wouldn’t be able to intuitively design the way we do if we didn’t treat them as athletes, as top-performers. There would be no other way to get the insight and nuance of how they compete outside of studying every aspect of their play to determine which features our products need for them to excel.

Pros can perform well on any product, but tuning specialized gear so they can play at their peak to win championships is an honor and very different from recreational gaming gear.

The ‘Designed with Pros’ process ensures we don’t design in a silo. A core part of the PRO Series design philosophy is to co-create with the people who depend on these tools the most – esports athletes and aspiring pros.

Pros bring a level of expertise and insight that only comes from thousands of hours of competitive gameplay and they’ve experimented in ways that we’ve never thought of. By collaborating directly with them, we uncover subtle pain points and opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed.

The breadth of our player pool also gives us fascinating insight. Observing how pros in League of Legends or Counter-Strike prefer different equipment for their unique needs is fascinating. What is important to one title can be less important in another and our collaborations teach us a lot about these nuances.

One of the biggest realizations while developing SUPERSTRIKE was seeing how fast pros click their mouse while we were doing tests, it’s really crazy.

But there was one player using a very specific technique called ‘jitter’ clicking. It’s common in PVP Minecraft, but this was a Counter-Strike player that had adapted and mastered this technique to click in very fast bursts, giving him the fastest click-per-second of anyone we tested at the time.

I had never seen that before and I couldn’t believe how fast he could click with the SUPERSTRIKE, that moment really solidified our approach that this mouse was something special – not only in the hands of pros, but for everyone. Seeing the potential it gave an esports pro, really sticks with me.