Jessie K. imagines someone opening Pure while waiting for a rideshare, or with a little time to spare at a friend’s place. They find someone they know, join a game, and start playing without spending the first few minutes figuring out the interface.
That picture has guided much of her work as founding designer at Pure Interactive. Known professionally as Jessie K., Eun Gyu Kil joined the company after studying graphic design at Parsons School of Design and working at larger companies, where her responsibilities were usually confined to one part of a bigger project.
Pure offered her the chance to shape the entire experience, and she already had a personal connection to the kind of product it was building.
“Some of my closest friendships started through games, so to me, gaming has always been social,” she said.
Pure Interactive develops a social gaming app that connects friends for online poker and real-money play. The company says it is a social gaming platform rather than a casino and does not take a rake from games between friends. For Kil, the appeal was bringing familiar social interactions into a gaming experience people could open whenever they had a few minutes.
The first challenge was deciding what that should actually look like on a phone.
Less Noise Around the Table
Even before joining Pure, Kil knew poker well enough to recognize which parts of the game shouldn’t change. Cards need to be immediately recognizable, and players should be able to understand what’s happening at the table without learning a new visual language. She was less attached to the clutter surrounding those familiar elements.
Many gaming apps fill their screens with attention-grabbing graphics and frequent prompts. Kil wanted Pure to feel more restrained, especially because she imagined people opening it during short breaks.
She drew inspiration from apps she personally enjoyed using, paying attention to the ones that rarely made her stop and think about where to go next. Her design process involves breaking complicated interactions into smaller pieces and experimenting with arrangements until the result feels natural. She also uses AI-assisted tools during iteration, with the resulting decisions feeding into Pure’s wider design system.
Working on the product has meant thinking beyond the visual design skills she developed at Parsons. Kil has to consider what happens when someone taps a button and how much information belongs on the screen at that moment.
The social features add their own complications because Pure is designed around people who already know each other.
“When people already know each other, the game doesn’t need to manufacture a social connection – it needs to give that connection more ways to show up,” Kil said.
That might mean giving someone an easy way to challenge a friend or react during a hand. Those interactions should feel natural during play, and Kil has to decide how to make them available without distracting everyone from the cards.
Money Changes What People Need to See
Designing the payment experience required Kil to think more carefully about how users understand an action before completing it.
She started by recalling transactions she’d made herself, paying attention to which ones felt straightforward and which left her uncertain about what had happened. The experiences she trusted most made the amount clear and gave her a good understanding of what would happen after she confirmed.
“Payments are where people decide whether they trust you,” she said. That became an important consideration as she designed the financial interactions within Pure.
The app is intended to feel quick and easy to use, but Kil doesn’t want speed to come at the expense of information someone needs when money is involved.
“We make payments faster by removing unnecessary steps, not by hiding information users need,” she explained.
Finding that balance takes more than choosing a clean layout. Payment screens need to communicate information clearly, and people coming from a game should understand what they’re agreeing to without working through an unfamiliar process.
Kil’s responsibilities extend across the product’s wider visual identity. She works on the brand and website alongside the app, giving her a level of ownership she hadn’t experienced in her earlier design roles.
That range of work was one of the reasons she joined Pure. At a larger company, she had contributed within an established system. At Pure, she has helped decide how that system should work.
Designing Beyond Poker
As Pure develops games beyond poker, Kil is thinking about how much of the original experience should carry over.
Each game will have its own requirements, so she doesn’t expect every interface to look identical. What she wants to preserve is the ease of understanding what to do without a long tutorial. The way friends find and interact with one another also needs to remain familiar.
That gives Kil another design problem as the product grows. She has to create enough consistency that someone recognizes Pure when opening a new game, while leaving room for the details that make each game different.
Her work now reaches into decisions that will affect products she hasn’t designed yet. Rather than starting with a visual style and applying it everywhere, she’s developing rules that other designers and engineers can use when new experiences are added.
For someone who joined because she wanted to own more of the design process, that responsibility is part of what makes the role interesting. The next game may look different from the poker table she helped shape, and she’ll have to figure out how much of the interface players already know should carry over.
