About

Hi, I'm Ruwaiz.

I shape behavioural systems, prototype in code, and write about design well beyond games.

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Work Experience

Senior Experience Designer

Nordeus

Oct 2024 – Present

Shaping a new game before release, building and tuning its core systems with research, product and engineering.
Owned the progressive teaching systems that introduce game mechanics without overloading new players.
Built a prototyping workflow with AI tooling, so the team tests design hypotheses in code earlier and with less ambiguity.
Leading the UX team and mentoring designers on craft, decision clarity and how to frame ambiguous problems.

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Senior Experience Designer

Zynga

Jul 2023 – Jan 2024

Improved new user retention on FarmVille 3 by redesigning navigation and the first time user experience.
Tied design decisions to player behaviour by owning A/B validation and KPI measurement from soft launch through global launch and live operations.
Raised craft and decision clarity across the team by mentoring a junior designer and an intern.

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Experience Designer

Zynga

Jul 2021 – Jul 2023

Reduced early churn by redesigning onboarding and navigation systems.
Balanced player motivation with business outcomes by reworking reward and ad watching flows, lifting completion without hurting player sentiment.
Gave design and engineering one source of truth by building the design system in Figma and mirroring it in Unity prefabs.
Shaped product direction by presenting UX strategy and rationale to stakeholders across disciplines.

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Associate Experience Designer

Zynga

Jul 2019 – Jul 2021

Owned the UX direction of Empires & Allies as its sole designer, aligning features with business needs, market feedback and user testing.
Directed revenue KPIs and feature roadmaps as acting APM in Q1 2021.
Improved engagement by writing SQL to track feature completion and find drop off points, then turning those findings into design changes.

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Associate Experience Designer

Glu Mobile (Now EA)

Mar 2018 – Jul 2019

Reduced churn and improved retention through funnel analysis on new user onboarding.
Tested new feature concepts early by running Playtest Cloud sessions on Figma clickthrough prototypes, turning player feedback into actionable research reports.
Designed and iterated on features from ongoing user research and usability testing.
Grounded decisions in data with quantitative and qualitative surveys, using data dashboards and SurveyMonkey.

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A Little History

It started in 2009, when a classmate mentioned he was building a website and it suddenly felt like something I could do too. A car blog on Blogspot came first, then Bootstrap, then Jekyll, and a long stretch of learning how to learn. I'm writing about that whole journey in From Portfolio to Garden.

I'm from India, grew up between languages and cultures, and that shows up in how I design. What feels obvious to one person can be completely invisible to another.