UI/UX Design Lessons from Gaming: A Baccarat Case Study
The demands of UI/UX design across different domains fascinates me. In biology, I wrestled with visualizing thousands of data points to communicate research findings. In software development, I focused on creating intuitive experiences for users navigating complex features. In game development, I'm challenged with crafting end-to-end experiences for players who might be encountering entirely new concepts or mechanics they've never seen before.
Yesterday, I practiced UI/UX by building a baccarat simulation at baccaratsurvivor.com. This simple data visualization exercise served as a valuable exploration of how to present hundreds of game results and statistics in an intuitive way. The project became a great sandbox for practicing responsive design and information hierarchy across different screen sizes.
The Role of UI/UX Across Disciplines
Each field I've worked in has taught me different aspects of UI/UX design:
- Scientific Research: The challenge of distilling complex datasets into clear, meaningful visualizations that can tell a story at a glance
- Software Development: Creating interfaces that grow with users and the software itself, from first-time visitors to power users mastering advanced, and often ever-evolving, features
- Game Development: Designing intuitive experiences that teach as they entertain, making complex systems accessible and enjoyable even as the game progresses and the mechanics get more intricate
Baccarat: A UI/UX Case Study
I decided to build a baccarat simulation using a dormant domain I had for awhile — baccaratsurvivor.com. It was a fun and interesting UI/UX challenge for sure. Baccarat, despite its fairly simple rules (from a distance it looks like calling heads or tails) presents several visualization challenges:
- Displaying current and past game state clearly without overwhelming new players
- Visualizing betting "patterns" across a vast history of outcomes (of course past outcomes don't indicate future results, but humans are pattern-seeking creatures - we can't help but see meaning in randomness at scale)
- Creating an interface that works seamlessly on both desktop and mobile devices
Casino Games: Artisans of UI/UX
Casino games offer amazing examples in UI/UX design. The games have to be understood and enticing in just a few seconds as you walk by them. Each game has evolved its own visual language, with baccarat being particularly interesting to me in its surface simplicity that fronts a deeply devoted player base:
- Baccarat: Emphasizes elegance and simplicity, reducing unintuitive card draw rules to a simple binary choice while maintaining the excitement of each reveal and the allure of seeing patterns in random outcomes over time
- Roulette: Uses color and spatial arrangement to make playing intuitive, with the wheel itself becoming an iconic visual element
- Craps: Transforms a simple dice roll into an engaging social experience where players collectively invest in outcomes
These games are masterclasses in UI/UX - they're instantly approachable yet deeply engaging. A first-time player can understand baccarat in seconds ("bet on which side wins"), but the presentation of statistics, trends, and "patterns" creates an endlessly engaging experience that keeps players coming back. This balance of immediate clarity with deep engagement is something I wanted to explore in my simulation.
Technical Implementation
For the baccarat project, I chose a lightweight tech stack focused on performance and flexibility:
- Tailwind CSS for responsive, maintainable styling
- Chart.js for data visualization, balancing capability with performance
The mobile experience proved particularly challenging. Representing hundreds of data points on a small screen while maintaining usability required careful consideration of information hierarchy and interactive elements. I don't think I cracked this yet as there's simply too many screen sizes to consider.
Beyond Games: UI/UX as Product
Companies like Robinhood demonstrate how UI/UX can be the product itself. They didn't invent financial markets or options trading, but they made it more enjoyable and thus more approachable for the masses. This mirrors what I aimed for with the baccarat simulation - taking a game's concept and making it quickly accessible and engaging to players of all experience levels.
This principle extends to all software development. Whether you're building a game, an app, or a scientific resource, the value of the user interface is often underappreciated by creators and entrepreneurs. It's not just about making things look good - it's about making complex systems accessible, engaging, and enjoyable to use. Sometimes the best innovation isn't a new feature, but a better way to experience existing ones.
Studying casino games has been enlightening - they represent some of the most refined examples of UI/UX design, perfected over decades to maximize engagement. Imagine this level of design sophistication applied to education, health, or personal growth tools - experiences designed to enrich rather than extract. The core principles are the same: make it approachable, make it engaging, but aim that engagement toward helping users thrive rather than separating them from their money. Through the tools I'm building at KokuTech, I aim to be part of this positive usage of UI/UX design.