Cheryl Platz, Creative Director at the Pokemon Company International and author of "The Game Development Strategy Guide," returns to The Product Experience to explore how video game design principles can transform product development. From her time at Riot Games and Marvel Strike Force to teaching at Carnegie Mellon, Cheryl shares hard-won lessons about player motivation, onboarding, and building products that thrive.
The gaming industry has undergone a fundamental shift: competition is no longer the primary driver of engagement, now accounting for under 20% of player motivations. Instead, self-expression and companionship dominate modern gaming. Riot's entire business model exemplifies this transformation, built on selling character skins rather than the game itself. This evolution mirrors broader changes in how users engage with digital products across industries.
Through compelling case studies, including the Disney Friends playtest that rewrote design assumptions and a catastrophic Marvel Strike Force server outage that became a UX win, Cheryl demonstrates why the same principles that make games engaging can unlock growth in enterprise software. Discover how journey mapping scales to complex progressions, why your enterprise users deserve the same UX attention as gamers, and how to turn crises into opportunities.
Chapters
Key Takeaways
Player motivations have fundamentally shifted. Competition is now under 20% of player motivations. Self-expression and companionship dominate modern gaming. Riot's entire business model is built on selling character skins, not the game itself.
Different users need different things from the same product. The Disney Friends case study proves this: girls engaged with pure relationship gameplay, boys needed visible mastery goals. Small changes (adding sparkles and a friendship meter) served both without compromising either experience.
Your enterprise users are gamers too. The same people using Xbox use your IT software. They have the same brains and bodies. Why does Xbox get all the UX love while config manager gets neglected?
Onboarding isn't optional if you want growth. Saying "players will learn by playing other games" or "they like it hard" locks out massive portions of your addressable market. The silent majority who bounce off your product won't show up in surveys.
Journey mapping scales to complex progressions. Whether it's 100 game levels or complex user flows, visualizing the entire experience helps identify gaps where users struggle without guidance.
Design for on-demand learning, not one-time tutorials. People are distracted, forget things, and return after weeks away. Separate learning content from progression rewards so users can access training anytime.
Honor your helpers. In any community, people want to support others. Build systems that recognize and empower these contributors rather than leaving them to Reddit and external forums.
Turn crises into opportunities. When Marvel Strike Force's servers crashed from orb shard overload, the UX team didn't just fix it. They redesigned the interface with logarithmic scaling, solving both the immediate problem and a pre-existing UX issue.
Keep reading
Why product democracy doesn't work - Blagoja Golubovski (VP Product, Usercentrics)
How to predict product failure
Building products for pilots: A case study - Cristina Bustos (Swiss AviationSoftware)
How to lead without authority - Sean Flaherty (ITX Corp)