Brief:
Design a new suite of mobile and desktop Poker apps and establish a distinctive visual identity, intuitive player journey and a cohesive tokenised design system to support development.
Create branded experience and visual assets for social media and player communications, adopting generative AI tools where necessary.
The scope of the work includes mapping user journeys, defining interaction patterns and creating UI frameworks for consistent cross-platform execution. As well as providing a user experience on par with industry competitors, the designs must account for both functional clarity and emotional engagement.
Agile mindset and design iteration
With development resources ready and waiting, early design progress was built on competitor analysis, player insights and learnings from early Figma prototypes.
By focussing on the core player journey, we built a backlog of development tasks which gave us time to iterate on these wireframes and produce high fidelity interfaces.
Design System and Design Tokens
Early in the project a design system and a library of design tokens was defined in co-operation with development.
Using semantic and global tokens early in the project provided consistency across te project as well as providing flexibility to make pre-launch design changes with minimum disruption.
From the outset we knew that taking on such a large project with limited design resources would require some out-of-the-box thinking. For intensive tasks that typically require a team of artworkers, AI tools were used to generate supporting artwork such as in-game avatars and promotional banners.
Build, test, learn...
As early designs were delivered by our development team, we used a small panel of test users to provide analytics and qualitative feedback which helped us refine and enhance core interfaces such as game lobbies and onboarding UI.
An on-going process of build, test, learn helped us quickly identify the weaknesses in the player journey in advance of beta launch.
Product-led Growth and new Verticals
Initial focus was on delivering an MVP product which was on par with competitor products.
Once the MVP milestone for the product was hit, we began iterating key gameplay design to create more complex interfaces which gave advanced players greater control over based on their gameplay preferences.
