Making it easy to manage live poker games
Pokerman App
Role
Lead Product Designer
Responsibilities
Concept, UX, UI, Branding
Platforms
Year
iOS
2019-20
The problem
There goes a lot of planning in organising even a friendly game of poker - sending invites on text or call, keeping track of who's at what buy-in amount, who owes to whom and how much and so on. Now, do this everyday and we are looking at sheets over sheets of expenses and player accounts. It's all repetitive and manual.
The Pokerman team organises regular poker home games for their friends and wanted to automate the manual processes of organising & scheduling games, inviting players, handling accounts and settlements. They also wanted to help players see the game stats & their own stats and the line-ups upfront so that they could choose which games to play.
There are plenty of software available for online poker games management but there was no such counterpart for live home games.
Hence, the birth of Pokerman.
Concept - What to build?
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User Flow
I did a task-based user testing with a lo-fi prototype to figure out the gaps in the user flow before moving on to the final designs.
A few of the tasks that I gave to the club owners and their game managers were -
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Login
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Create your club
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See the list of your club members
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See the stats of a particular member
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Create a game
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Invite players to a game
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Give chips to a player in a live game
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Finish a running game
Lo-fi Prototype Testing
Branding
After finalising the features and the flow of the app, I moved on to figuring out the tone and voice of Pokerman.
We associate poker and poker players with a life full of extravagance, extreme luxury or life on the edge, in general. But that's just on the facade. Within, every poker player is very meticulous about their in-game decisions, chips stack, opponents' behaviour and almost everything else.
We wanted Pokerman to stand for a brand that captures the essence of both the traits above- match the feel of royalty with the promise of safety.
A brand that can be trusted.
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Logo and Colour
The final logo is designed to look like club (one of the four marks in playing cards); letters P&M; a man or a manager to look after all your needs; or a person holding cards.
We chose plum as the primary colour of our app because it depicts it all - royal, loyal & modern.
Icons and Buttons
I used round elements as in-app icons and call-to-actions because they are the closest depiction of poker chips.
Call to Action buttons are designed to be solid and filled to enhance their affordance.
Whereas icons are more transparent and given some character with breaks in strokes.
Final Designs
Pokerman is essentially a tool to make organisation & management of live poker games easy and hence, simplicity and minimalism had to be the core of product design. I've kept task flows simple and intuitive,
straight-forward navigation with one-point access & neat-looking screens each with only the most relevant information and actions.
A club owner can create a club, invite players to their club, tag those players for easy reference.
A club owner can create a custom game - select the format, buy-in limits, player limits, time, location etc. and send invites to their club players.
An on-site game manager can manage the entire game through Pokerman - record all transactions, buyins, amount borrowed by a player, game expenses etc. and send a report to the owner at the end of the game.
Club owner and a club member can chat and request settlement through Pokerman app itself.
