Karl Bray is Luckbox’s Head of User Experience Design. His previous roles include Head of Design and Brand Services at Full Tilt, Design Studio Manager for Ryanair and working with Irish football legends on a coaching app. Here’s a little more about Karl …

Generally speaking, what does your role involve?

In broad terms, I work with the Product team to make Luckbox as enjoyable as possible for our players. The key to building great products is understanding your users. After that, you build according to their needs and concerns.

We sometimes talk of UX as addressing the ‘Why, What, How’ of Product Design: my job is to research why people need a particular product — including understanding people’s motivations and anxieties. Then I consider what functionality and features meets their requirements and, finally, I determine how to design the product in such a way that it’s best for the user, while also meeting any business goals.

Luckbox’s Head of User Experience Design Karl Bray

After designing with those factors in mind, we work with the Development team to go through as many build-test-learn iterations as it takes to get the User Experience right. The final product should look great, and feel very natural, graceful and intuitive to the user. Like many things, it feels effortless when it’s done right, but it takes a lot of work to get there.

Where are you based?

I’m based just outside Dublin, in Ireland. I share an apartment with a piano, a cello, half-a-dozen guitars, far too many books, and an increasingly large amount of Overwatch merchandise.

Please tell us a bit about your career and work so far

My qualifications are in traditional Product Design. We’re trained to design based on the needs of the user, as opposed to designing according to business assumptions or just designing whatever solution is easiest to build.

That user-centered methodology, built around strong Gestalt and Bauhaus philosophies, transferred very naturally to digital products, so I quickly found myself working in web and online environments.

I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t surrounded by comic books or video games and both have had a huge influence on my design career. Many gamers grew up playing consoles or PCs, but for me it was all about arcade gaming.

When I was young, I was absolutely amazed to see the Gauntlet arcade cabinet and hear that “Wizard needs food, badly” voice line for the first time. I felt the same when I first sat into Outrun’s Testarossa coin-op, or when I played that original six-button Street Fighter machine. Gaming experiences such as those left a strong impression on me, and I have always tried to make game experience central to my design career.

After college, I worked with some exciting start-ups, including a football coaching product designed with Ireland legends such as Paul McGrath, Steve Staunton and Packie Bonner.

In 2006 I joined Full Tilt Poker, working with the team creating all the user interface solutions and brand creative.

We defined the overall look and feel of the gameplay, and pretty soon our players were spending more time per month playing our games than on World of Warcraft and Facebook combined. A few years later, we designed the original fast-fold Rush Poker product that revolutionised online poker.

In 2012 I took over as Head of Design at Full Tilt, leading the design of mobile apps, web products and desktop software. I managed some incredible talent across our UI, UX, Creative Design and Copywriting teams and — together with our Marketing and Product teams — we built one of the most distinctive, authentic and recognisable brands in online gaming.

What attracted you to the project and what excites you about it?

I have this idea that humans really only excel at two things: learning through gameplay and socialising through storytelling. Pretty much everything humans create is immediately co-opted for gameplay, storytelling or socialisation.

What excites me about this project is that it is led by people who are immersed in esports

That’s evident in the esports scene right now — it’s a really vibrant mix of brilliant games, fantastic fan scenes and unbelievable stories. Just this year, we’ve seen Topson coming from apparently nowhere to win TI8 with OG; we’ve had drama and controversy at the EVO finals and we’ve seen amazing characters like Saebyeolbe, Fissure, Profit and Pine dominating Overwatch League.

The esports scene is about so much more than just the games: it’s about the players, their stories, the teams, the fans, the casters, the streamers and the live events.

What excites me about this project is that it is led by people who are immersed in esports; they are from the esports community and want to build something dedicated to the esports community. In that sense, it’s completely authentic.

Working in online poker, I was surrounded by incredibly smart and passionate people. Right across our product teams, server teams, dev teams, Marketing, Integrity and CS there were people who were completely engaged in poker and were driven to create the best possible experience for players. I get the same feeling about the people driving this project and I’m extremely excited to be part of the Luckbox story.