Poker, minus the bling

GetMega is a real money gaming platform aiming to be India’s gold standard for safe, skill-based gaming. I joined as fourth employee and founding designer, later building a team of nine.

This is how I reimagined Texas Hold’em Poker, end to end.

Success story

In March 2020, GetMega launched its own Poker. Revenue jumped 471%, and kept growing more than 90% month on month for the next few months.

A UX designer building a game

Mayank, our CEO, wanted UX inside the gameplay and a friendly, app-like look, not a gamified one. I was game designer, product designer and, in practice, product manager.

Context

GetMega began with games against the computer, like Dot’n’Dash and Fruit Ninja. We needed player versus player, and research pointed to Texas Hold’em.

Three key challenges

With product leadership, I prioritised ideas on user need, business value, tech feasibility and strategy. Three pain points stood out.

01. We misunderstood our players

We’d been building for college students and prioritising casual games like Carrom and Pool. Our active players told a different story.

Salaried

44.3%

Business owner

19.0%

Student

19.0%

Others

8.9%

Farmer

5.1%

Housewife

1.3%

Under 18

1%

18 to 25

43%

26 to 35

46%

36 to 45

9%

46 to 55

1%

02. How the industry looked

Online poker is male-dominated, and competitors advertised with hyper-sexualised female dealers.

Competitors marketed poker with hyper-sexualised dealers

03. Every app looked the same

Competitors were all landscape, built around a round table, with the same interactions and cluttered, gaudy, generic graphics.

MPL, Paytm First and Poker Baazi: landscape, cluttered and alike

Problem statement

Build a Texas Hold’em poker experience that is user-friendly, gender-neutral and in portrait mode, for salaried millennials in India.

How Texas Hold’em works

A standard 52-card deck. Players compare hands using the hand rankings, everyone bets an agreed amount with chips, and the best hand wins.

Texas Hold’em elements

There’s a lot happening on one screen, so I listed every element and grouped them.

01Game elements

• Pot
• Community cards
• Blinds
• Dealer
• Hand strength
• Cheatsheet

02Your information

• Your cards
• Stack
• Timer
• Last move
• Controls

03Other players

• Profile
• Stack
• Timer
• Last move
• Folded or active

04Secondary enhancers

• Reactions
• Voice
• Previous hands
• Onboarding

One portrait screen

Conceptualising

I sketched each element on its own, then explored how they could come together.

Paper sketches: each element first, then the full layout

User controls

Fold, check, call and raise are the heart of every hand, so the control panel could set us apart. I explored segmented buttons, number pads, quick pot amounts, sliders and round buttons.

Control panel explorations

Low fidelity wireframes

I prototyped four concepts and tested them internally with 22 teammates from different functions.

Low fidelity concepts 1 to 4. Nearly 90% of 22 teammates preferred concept 4

Visual design

I put together a mood board to capture the look.

Mood board for a calm, minimal look

Hi-fi elements

Fold is a down arrow, raise an up arrow and check a play icon, readable at a glance. Cards came in non-overlapping and overlapping layouts, so they scale to Rummy.

Deck symbols, chips, actions and two card decks built to scale to other games

UI explorations

We tried many colour palettes and visual approaches and put them to an internal vote.

Colour explorations. 23 of 26 picked the simple blue

Final output

Top: opponents. Middle: pot and community cards. Bottom: your cards, timer, stack, hand strength and controls, with a sliding raise panel.

Final table, annotated

Impact

Poker was an instant hit. Between February and May:

Poker also became our testing pod: ideas proven here lifted retention in Carrom and Pool. Marketing moved to the thrill of winning, with a gender-neutral dealer.

Impact

471% increase in revenue

Helped GetMega raise Series A

87% of company revenue from Poker

2% → 14.6% women on the platform, and climbing

Share of revenue by game

Poker

87%

Rummy

12.8%

Carrom

0.15%

Pool

0.03%

Everything else

<0.02%

Poker took off, month on month

What players told us

Once it shipped, we ran one-on-one interviews with players to learn what to fix and what to build next.

1. 01InterviewOne-on-one interviews with players
2. 02SortGrouped what they told us into themes
3. 03PrioritiseRanked fixes by impact on play
4. 04ShipBuilt the top fixes into the next release

See the full user research in Figma ↗

About 160 players rated the design 7.5 out of 10. They liked the cleaner look and seeing every player on one screen. They also told us what was broken, and each finding became a next step.

What we built next

Transparency. Real money gaming is known for cheat bots, so players could see fold ratios, aggression ratios, play style and hand history for everyone. We later added these to other games.

Hand history, fold and aggression ratios, and play style

Help for beginners. A walkthrough, a winning hands cheatsheet and gentle prompts like “You may choose to check instead”, shown before an accidental fold.

In-game messages, onboarding tips and a hand cheatsheet

HUD and social widget. Each opponent’s stack, name, photo and connection at a glance. Today every multiplayer game on GetMega uses it.

The HUD and social widget, later used across every multiplayer game

Still to come: Omaha poker, multi-table play, spectators, private and social tables, invites and a “guide me to play” mode.

Table controls, players and spectators, and guided tours

See it in action

Would love to talk about this one more in person.