Unlocking its Potential – How Kinguin’s product team weaves together a seamless user experience
Considering Kinguin is one of the largest online gaming marketplaces in the world, there is one key factor that has to be perfect – and that is the customer experience. Giovanni Varriale, Chief Product Officer, and his team have a key role in making sure that not only existing users are comfortable on the platform, but also that new customers are welcomed to a site that they can trust.
We sat down with Giovanni and discussed the role, the importance of user experience and some key talking points around this topic – with the goal of getting an insight into how Kinguin adapts and evolves to meet the needs of the consumer.
Giovanni is one of the most experienced Kinguiners in terms of his career at the organisation, having worked for Kinguin for 9 years. As the former Chief Marketing Officer and with experience in esports and gaming, he is able to call upon a wealth of knowledge that can help him make tough and informed decisions that benefit the user. His current role as Chief Product Officer entails overseeing all the products that Kinguin offers. This role is a mix of business, as well as development needs and requires multiple teams within the department to carry out the tasks effectively.
Kinguin’s product team focuses on two main users when it comes to user experience, the B2C buyer, and the B2B seller. These two users have different needs and require different resources. One of the biggest factors when it comes to this work is that the needs are always bigger than the available resources. The overall platform framework for example, is inherently different for each user; with different features, design choices and integrations. Giovanni and his team need to navigate these needs, and find a way to solve the problem effectively in a way which benefits the target user.
These issues must be overcome with innovation, as in the ecommerce industry, the user experience is key and is the main commodity. It’s the reason why people purchase and sell goods on their preferred platform. Do you require an account? Is the purchasing/selling process easy to understand? Are the goods/services easy to find on the website? Where do you place the login prompt during the purchasing process? All of these questions must be researched extensively to ensure that the approach that they take is the most effective one.
To gather the information they need to make informed decisions, Giovanni and his team use analytical tools such as heatmaps with Hotjar, surveying, Google Recommendation AI and other CRM tools such as Synerise to track user behaviour and any trends on the platform. These external solutions allow Kinguin to identify key areas that can be improved upon, and make decisions on how to make it more efficient for the user. This efficiency is built through a well designed UI/UX – and Kinguin wants to make it so that users don’t have to think twice when it comes to using their platform. The more natural it feels to use the platform, the higher the customer retention.
One of the tailored approaches and improvements the product team made is the master product page. It allows B2C users to easily find all content and editions of a title in one, easy-to-navigate webpage. For some titles, which have 20+ additional content packages, this feature is key for buyers, enabling them to find exactly what they want with ease. To implement this, the team not only had to research the UI and what the best way to present the goods was, but also how to adjust the back-end database to ensure that the filters and search function would operate correctly, whilst the system accurately locates and lists the correct products.
Looking to the future, the world of potential products and the experience surrounding them at Kinguin seems to be expansive. Whether that be an increase in the ease of access for sellers to use Kinguin’s marketplace to promote and distribute their goods, or the introduction of Web 3.0, NFTs and Cryptocurrency. Giovanni and his team will be crafting a tailored approach to ensuring that the users are happy to use the platform.