Satoshi Tajiri, Pokemon, & How it can make you a better UX Designer

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

I grew up with Pokemon. The anime, trading cards, and bootleg versions of the games for the gameboy — I loved it all. Later in life I found a career in UX Design and saw things come full circle when I decided to learn a bit more about the creator of Pokemon and see if I can apply my UX lens to his life journey and what I could learn from it.

Satoshi Tajiri was born in 1965. As a kid he spent most of his time outside collecting bugs. Apparently, his friends even called him “Dr.Bug.”

In his teenage years, he found arcade games. This passion escalated to him creating a magazine focusing on the game scene, with tips, tricks, and information about all the latest games. This magazine would be called “Game Freak” — later the name of his company that would go on to create Pokemon.

Original Game Freak Magazines

Satoshi lived the bootstrap lifestyle to the max. His magazine was hand drawn and hand stapled (!). Continuing to immerse himself in this new world, he even began creating rudimentary games and entering competitions with other game developers.

I’ll save you the full biopic, but Satoshi ended up making more progress than he thought as a game developer. What started out as a few indie games led to an opportunity to join Nintendo and resulted in the transition of Gamefreak as a magazine company to a full on game studio.

Believe it or not, it took 6 years to make Pokemon and nearly bankrupted his studio. Nintendo originally wanted Satoshi to work on other game styles. Pokemon was more of this wild card idea he had and took a lot of convincing before he was able to focus on it. Once launched though, the game took off among Japanese youth and would go on to become the hit we know it as today (a 71 Billion Dollar hit)

What can we learn from Tajiri? 💡

1. Tajiri combined his passions from childhood and brought them into adulthood. The inspiration for Pokemon literally came from the feeling he had catching bugs as a kid
2. Tajiri started small. Before he started a mega media empire, he was just a passionate teen hand making magazines
3. Tajiri trusted the process and kept going on despite the looming possibility of failure

How can this make us better at UX / Product Design? 💎

1. Inspiration from design can come from places special to you — like nature, memorable experiences, etc
2. Sometimes your end product may be totally different than what you intended in your mind. It’s important to pivot
3. Not everything is done in a day. Constant iteration and consistency can bring out the best in a product
4. Networking doesn’t have to feel like some sleezy thing — taking part in events/competitions/meet ups in your area about a topic you like can be a great way to level up your ideas/product (assuming its related to your passion)

Resources

If you’re interested, I have a couple resources available for UX designers / researchers looking to clean up their reporting.

My UXR toolkit contains everything you need to plan, organize, and share UX research: https://aadildigital.gumroad.com/l/uxrtoolkit

I also have a free Figma template file to create research case studies for your organization or personal portfolio: https://www.figma.com/community/file/1110979839025368786

About me

I’m a design researcher over at IBM and also a UX teacher at Brainstation. You can view my portfolio here // and my design blog here