How Gameskraft is Setting a New Standard in Product Design for the Gaming Industry
CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Ms. Shuchita Baranwal, Head of Design, Gameskraft
Who is the mastermind behind the product design innovations at Gameskraft?
There are no masterminds in Gameskraft, we are an organization that is made by its culture and its people. Our creativity and innovations are the result of a collaborative effort among a team of designers, product managers, engineers, and marketers. There are no individuals working here.
At Gameskraft, what matters to us is that we facilitate a collaborative culture where we thrive with simplicity and innovation. A culture where there is no rigidity and no silos. Creativity and innovation rarely thrive in a vacuum. We acknowledge and celebrate all our wins and see ourselves as harbingers of change.
What is your role in developing a brand identity through experience principles?
I personally look forward to building a stronger connection with our players that creates a more memorable, cohesive, and effective brand experience that aligns with Gameskraft’s values, mission, and goals.
Our experience principles guide all interactions that players have with our brands and help to create a strong, recognizable brand identity. We always keep the needs, goals, and behaviors of the user first and believe our words and design should be simple enough to understand, but attractive enough to catch attention. We believe in actionable insights, which enable us to make better decisions earlier and help us understand players’ behaviour and needs. We have extensive processes with data analysts to measure the effectiveness of our brand colours and associate palette, content tonality, and keywords which help us build properties that perform across different platforms and channels.
We invest a lot in the experimentation of brand assets and copy leading to penetrative A/B testing regarding different age cohorts and geographic locations. These data insights help us make informed decisions for the future and ensure that our brands are headed in the right direction.
How do you ensure user experiences through designs and create business influence through their appropriate interpretation?
In many ways, we are wired to create.
In design, we are united by our unwillingness to abide by conventional ways of thinking and doing things. In choosing to do things differently, we accept the possibility of uncertainty and failure but it is precisely this risk that opens up the doors to true innovation.
We gather our forces of creativity, curiosity, and critical thinking to enrich the lives of our players. Our secret to creative greatness appears to be in doing things differently even when that means failing, especially during idea-generation phases.
We help create a world that is more welcoming of the creative spirit, and we make it possible to find a greater connection with our players and with ourselves in the process.
We truly understand that we are in the business of design and it has a deep purpose to solve. With this philosophy in mind, we believe in taking bold decisions to build successful solutions. However, we also maintain balance by taking tiny steps towards big changes i.e making the smallest nudges for the big effect.
It requires an incredible amount of time to get design and UX right. User research and analysis of our players help us define the problem. With this clarity of purpose, solutions are created. We test, iterate and reiterate by putting ourselves in the player’s shoes, and exploring different scenarios for multiple contextual use cases. By measuring the success of our designs through metrics such as user satisfaction and engagement, we ensure that our designs are meeting both our player and business needs and driving appropriate business influence.
What sets Gameskraft apart from others, and how is your expertise in IA, UX research, interactive design, and usability evaluation related to it?
By staying true to our vision “To create unmatched experiences, everyday, everywhere”, we have created superior product experiences for our players. Another thing that sets us apart is our culture that not only focuses on profitable business solutions, but is also built on deep emotions. We have immense love for our players, for employees, and for our work. We celebrate our successes and also acknowledge our failures. Built on this spirit of collaboration and finding successful solutions together is how we are crafting world-class gaming products to entertain everyone.
Feedback is an important tool. It’s also important to be decisive and have clear success metrics and proactively take action to bring clarity at every step.
Whatever we do is for our players; understanding our players’ goals and how our offerings can help is what we focus on. We think of ourselves as problem solvers helping to make our players’ needs more attainable. Our intensive research and data-driven approach to building solutions help to identify our players’ needs and their behaviour. The product design team focuses on creating easy-to-use, engaging, and interactive experiences for users, while the brand design team ensures that the design is attractive, modern, and simple to understand with great recall value.
Why do you believe in having multiple skill sets in the complex world of product design to provide customers with a quality experience?
A brilliant design is like magic to me. The best solutions are actually invisible to the user as correct solutions will make the user feel that this was the most obvious way to build.
Design is more than just aesthetics. It is a complex, all-encompassing, and human-centric approach to finding solutions that tackle problems of all manner and levels of significance, not just those related to style.
Design is basically “The What”.
What should you be building?
What’s the right opportunity to go after?
What’s the right problem to solve?
Asking the right question is half the answer.
For the end user to truly experience this delight and magic, a lot goes behind the scenes. Product design is a complex process that involves user research, wireframing, visual design, graphic design, motion design, prototyping, testing, and iterations. The execution stage further requires designers to have knowledge of the technology stack, building challenges and solutions for optimization for various devices and platforms along with understanding performance and data analysis. Each stage requires a different set of skills and expertise, and having multiple skill sets allows designers to use a system thinking approach to arrive at solutions and reduces the time spent on actually building an effective solution.
Systems thinking itself is a mindset; it’s a way of looking at the world that understands how everything is connected. It focuses on the emergent properties of a whole system, which cannot be predicted from the characteristics of its individual parts.
Furthermore, it helps to collaborate effectively with other stakeholders, such as developers, marketers, and business analysts. By working together, they can ensure that the product meets user needs and aligns with business goals, resulting in a high-quality experience for the players.
How can design help with an enhanced experience of understanding technology in an easier way for users/ brand’s TG?
We are defined by what we build. It’s what we believe we can and decide to act. As an organization, we understand that greatness is never a given, it must be earned. Our journey has never been one of the shortcuts or settling for less. To make a big and meaningful difference, we aim to create a large-scale impact today through technology and wise deployment of capital.
Consider technology as the sword and business as the shield which designers can use to make great things happen. It’s important to know what you want to create, and creativity alone is not enough. Designers must be ready to think big and visualize the solutions to problems.
At Gameskraft, our designers work to simplify complex information for our players using clear concise language, visuals, and intuitive experience flows. Player journeys across our platforms are built for trust, safety, and seamless experience. Feedback is critical to understand how technology works, and a good design can provide feedback in a way that is easy to understand and provides the user with the
information that they need to make informed decisions. By using effective storytelling which is engaging, consistent, and memorable for our different cohorts of players, we build a more contextual, delightful, and personalized experience for them.
By incorporating these design principles, we create an enhanced experience of understanding technology for our players, build trust, increase engagement, and drive business success.
