Fixing Zupee Ludo

Designing for the User Nobody Designed For

Role
Design & Research

Platform
Android & iOS

Timeline
5-6 months

Tools
• Figma

• User Research

• A/B Testing

Industry
Real Money Gaming

Crafted with love & care

© 2026 Gurmeet Singh. All rights reserved.

A Little Context First

Zupee's hero product, Ludo Supreme, is India's most played real-money skill game with 100M+ users, prime-time TV ads, and Kapil Sharma and Salman Khan as the face of the brand but beneath that scale was a quiet problem. New users from Tier 2 and Tier 3 India were not making it through their first game.

So how might we fix something that nobody could even see was broken?

The Invisible Problem

Approximately 30% of new users were dropping off within their first gameplay session. They did not know what to tap, when to act, or that missing three turns would get them kicked out of a game they just paid to join. No crashes. No errors. Just confusion that quietly pushed users away and never brought them back.

Witnessing this was a gut punch I did not see coming.

How We Found the Truth

No labs. No forms. No formal setups.

We took the research to the streets. 10 teams, 43 first time users, across Delhi NCR.

One rule was non negotiable. Nobody who had used Zupee before. We needed completely fresh eyes.

Each session followed a structured discussion guide. Users were asked to download the app, sign up, and play their first game while we observed without interfering. We noted every moment of confusion, every wrong tap, every pause, and every comment they made out loud.

Who we spoke to

🚕
Cab and auto drivers

📦
Delivery partners

👮🏽‍♂️
Security gaurds

🧹
House help

👱‍♂️
Shop helpers

👨‍🔧
Mechanics

Understanding the Damage

What came out of those sessions was not what any of us expected.

Users were not failing because Ludo was hard. They were failing because the rules of this version of Ludo were completely invisible to them.

🔍 The research said it all

Gameplay timer: Nobody noticed it. "Yeh do timer kyun hai?"

Tapping the dice: Almost every user tapped the profile picture first and lost their turn before even finding the dice. One who did find it rolled and just sat there, waiting. "6 aayega tab token chalega."

He thought the game worked like offline Ludo.


Turn timer: Users had no idea their turn had a countdown. "Chance aayi thi chali gayi, koi baat nahi." They would sit and wait, lose their turn silently and not even register it had happened.


Skips and lives: Nobody knew three missed turns meant being thrown out of a game they paid to join. "Jab galti hogi tab hi seekh aayegi."


Winner screen: One user saw his phone number on the result screen and thought it was a bank account. He did not know he had won. "Agar maine paise daale hi nahi toh jeeta hua paisa kaise milega?"

Defining the Fight

Every drop-off, every missed turn, every confused user traced back to the same four moments. We stopped guessing and started there.

This was not just bad UX. Every silent drop-off had a cost. A user who never completed their first game never made a deposit, never came back and never told a friend.

Four constraints shaped every decision we made

We could not change the core UI of the game


We could not add anything that would exceed the game loading time


Everything had to be light enough for tech to build and ship without breaking the experience


Nothing could feel alien to experienced players. The changes had to be invisible to anyone who already knew how to play

Four moments. Four failures. Four things we had to get right.

⏰

Make the game timer impossible to miss

🎲

Make the dice the most obvious thing to tap

⏳

Give users a clear sense of time and consequence

🏆

Make winning and losing feel unmistakably different

PROCESS

Diagnosing the Pain Points

01

The game timer

Users had no idea the game was timed. The timer sat in a corner with no visual urgency, no audio signal and no way to prepare. Most users only discovered it existed after they had already lost.

I added a spotlight on the timer the moment the game started paired with a voice cue. For users playing with volume off I added a heads up nudge on the loading screen before the game began. For users who still missed it I introduced a force volume prompt so the audio could actually do its job.

Key Decision

Decision: I went with a three layer approach. Spotlight, voice cue and a pre-game heads up nudge.

Why: A single nudge was not enough for this user. Volume was often off. Attention was scattered. Every layer existed to catch someone a different way.

Before

After

02

Tapping the dice

The dice looked like every other element on screen. Nothing told users it was the one thing they needed to tap first. Most tapped the profile picture instead and lost their turn before the game even started.

I layered three signals together. A spotlight to draw the eye, a hand gesture animation to show exactly what to tap and a voice cue to reinforce it. First time, every time, no confusion.

Key Decision

Decision: Spotlight plus hand gesture plus voice; all three together.

Why: Hand gesture alone was not enough for users who had never played a mobile game. The spotlight created focus. The gesture showed the action. The voice confirmed it.

Before

After

03

The turn timer

The turn timer was sitting on the profile picture. Users tapped the profile, missed their turn and had no idea why. There was also no colour change to signal urgency so turns expired silently.

I moved the timer directly onto the dice so the thing counting down was the same thing you needed to tap. I added colour segregation — turning red in the final seconds — so users felt urgency without reading a single word.

Key Decision

Decision: Move the timer from profile to dice and add colour urgency.

Why: The placement was the root cause. Fixing the visual without fixing the location would have solved nothing.

Before

After

04

Skips and lives

One missed turn was invisible. Two was confusing. Three and you were out of a game you just paid to join. Users had no way of knowing how close they were to being removed.

I introduced two stage nudging. A bold centre screen nudge on the first miss. Then a persistent heart icon that turned red with each subsequent miss, paired with a voice over. Users always knew exactly where they stood.

Key Decision

Decision: Two stage nudge; centre screen first, persistent status indicator second.

Why: A single nudge was too easy to miss. The heart turning red gave users a running count of their remaining chances without adding any text.

Before

After

05

The result screen

The winning screen showed a phone number. Users did not know it was theirs. One user thought it was a bank account number. Winning and losing looked almost identical so users walked away confused about what had just happened.

I replaced the phone number with "You" and built distinct procedural animations for winning, losing and a tie so each outcome felt different, earned and unmistakable.

Key Decision

Decision: Replace phone number with "You" and build distinct outcome animations.

Why: This was not just a UX fix. It was a product call. A user who does not know they won will never come back to win again.

Before

After

Outcomes

The changes shipped as part of Phase 1 of the First Time Player Experience in January 2024. The results were not subtle.

First gameplay retention went from 24% to 52% between January and July 2024. More than double. For a product at the scale of 100 million users that is not a design win. That is a business win.

Every number that moved traced back to a user who finally understood what to tap, when to act and whether they had won. That is what designing for the right person looks like.

Retention before

24%

Retention After

52%

Improvent

2x

Timeline

Jan–Jul 2024

Designed and shipped across Phase 1 of FTCP covering dice interaction, token movement, gameplay timer, turn timer and winner screen.

Key Takeaways

Retention is a design problem before it is a business problem.
Every percentage point we recovered was a user who stayed, played again and eventually deposited. Good UX and good business are the same thing.

The user nobody designed for was the user driving the numbers.
Tier 2 and 3 users were the majority. Designing for them was not a nice to have. It was the only way to move the metric that mattered.

Constraints kept the solution honest.
Working within tight boundaries meant every decision had to earn its place. Nothing was added for aesthetics. Everything was there because a user needed it.

A confused user is a lost user.
At 100 million users even a 1% improvement in first gameplay retention is a significant business outcome. Clarity is not soft. It is revenue.

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