Re-centering a learning platform on accumulated user pain
Leading design for dashboards, reports, and learning games while rebuilding the team’s trust and delivery cadence.
- Education
- Design leadership
- Product
Product + game design leader · Bengaluru, India
Building at the edge of art × technology
I build the systems behind play, products & teams.
I’m K V Ketan — a design leader, game maker, researcher, and inveterate tinkerer. I turn messy, high-stakes problems into things people can understand, use, and enjoy.
01Gamessystems · economies · joy
02Productsplatforms · AI · research
03Teamsculture · craft · scale
curiosity
always on
always on
14+years making
things make sense
things make sense
75M+learners touched
at Wayground
at Wayground
6M+daily players
at MPL
at MPL
26games shipped
with the team
with the team
Built with teams at
- WAYGROUND
- MPL
- sumo logic
- hike
- TINY MOGUL
- CAT
Work that moved the system, not just the pixels.
All workBuilding a design system for a portfolio of games
Scaling game craft, platform UX, and a multidisciplinary design organisation without turning quality into a bottleneck.
- Games
- Design leadership
- Platform
Turning enterprise complexity into reusable product systems
Schema-driven interfaces, health observability, and platform frameworks that helped teams ship consistent enterprise workflows.
- Platform
- Enterprise UX
- Systems design
Making user research fast enough to change the product
Building a research practice, team, and low-cost lab that turned direct user evidence into an everyday product habit.
- Research
- Product culture
- Mobile
02 · The through-line
A designer’s eye.
A builder’s hands.
A restless brain.
I was writing code, prototyping games, and soldering circuits long before AI made “builder” fashionable. Neurodivergence gives me an unusually wide field of view; design gives that curiosity structure.
My career has moved through interaction design, game systems, research, enterprise platforms, and design leadership. The medium changes. The instinct does not: understand the whole machine, then make every part work better together.
The longer story ↗01
Think in systems
Trace incentives, constraints, flows, and second-order effects.
02
Prototype the truth
Build enough to expose what a deck or mock-up cannot.
03
Lead through clarity
Give teams context, standards, and room to make excellent decisions.
Side quests are part of the main quest.
Enter the lab
01 / ongoing build
Mechanical keyboards as interaction design
Building for sound, feel, ergonomics, and the tiny feedback loops underneath every keystroke.
↗
02 / perpetual side quest
Pixel art, tiny games, and cultural mischief
Using severe visual constraints to build worlds, jokes, and playable points of view.
↗ 03 / prototyping
Electronics that escape the breadboard
Arduino sketches, PCB experiments, small instruments, and the pleasure of a system becoming physical.
↗ mechanical keyboards✦electronics✦music production✦ board games✦cinematography✦cycling
Ideas I’ve sent out into the world.
WHY
DESIGNERS
MUST PLAY
MORE GAMES!▶
DESIGNERS
MUST PLAY
MORE GAMES!▶
Salesforce Design Days · 2024
Why Designers Must Play More Games!
Games as a practical toolkit for feedback, systems thinking, and designing human motivation.
Pixel to Prototype: Create with Emotion, Build for Joy
Product (Un)Conference
Generating and evaluating design attributes for service design
Design for All, Vol. 8, No. 3
A Persuasive Game for Social Development of Children
4th International Conference on Intelligent HCI
What I’m thinking about between builds.
All notes 01rant
Designers must play more games
Games are not an escape from product work. They are a dense, playable education in feedback, rules, motivation, and consequence.
6 min ↗ 02essayAI does not remove the need for interface design
Natural language feels universal until a system is uncertain, takes action, remembers the wrong thing, or needs to earn trust.
7 min ↗ 03field-noteYour org chart is already in the product
Team boundaries, decision rights, and operating rhythms eventually become user journeys — whether you designed them or not.
5 min ↗