Gameroom — A UX Case Study · Taroon Tyagi

Case study · now.gg · 2024

Gameroom: from solo gaming to social playground.

A functional but sterile MVP became a place school-aged Chromebook gamers call "our club" — in four iterations over five months.

+183%
Session duration · 12 → 34 min
81%
48-hour return rate · from 32%
+432%
Monthly active users
9.1/10
Satisfaction · from 6.2
Role
Principal Designer — led graphic, motion and UX teams
Platform
now.gg cloud gaming · Chromebook web
Timeline
5 months · two-week sprints · 4 rounds
Users
Students aged 12–18 on Chromebooks
Final implementation — fullscreen gameplay with the social layer collapsed

The challenge

Same games, same classroom — playing alone.

Students on Chromebooks used now.gg to play the same titles side by side, but the platform gave them no way to share it.

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Who we designed for

Three roles, one room.

Research surfaced three personas that stayed fixed through every round. Each feature had to earn its place with at least one of them.

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Process

Two-week sprints, a playable prototype every time.

Each round ran the full design-thinking loop — empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test — and ended with something students could actually use. What follows is what each round taught us.

Design thinking loop: empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test, implement — grouped as understand, explore, materialise

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What we heard

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What we built

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What users said

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What we learned

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In the room

The details that made it a place.

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Under the hood

One token, six themes, zero handoffs.

Four rounds in five months was only possible because theming lived in a token system, not in screens. Figma Tokens was the single source of truth; a build step turned every change into CSS variables in the live product.

Gameroom design system cover: members list, chat, profile panel and primary colour tokens

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Change a brand colour once at the primitive layer and every dependent component updates in Figma and in production on the next sync. Designers previewed and accessibility-checked theme variants side by side before anything shipped.

Tokens Studio for Figma showing Light, Cyberpunk, Aloha, Woody, Casino and Space theme sets with colour, radius, shadow and typography tokens
Six theme sets managed in Tokens Studio

Impact

MVP to round four.

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What I'd carry forward

Emotion outperformed features every round.

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Where it goes next

A social layer for all of now.gg.

Cross-game socialisation, community events, user-generated environments, identity continuity across the platform, deeper streamer tooling and a richer spectator seat.