Maya Sari
Privacy & Compliance Lead · Suntongames
Maya is a data privacy expert familiar with GDPR, Indonesia's UU PDP law, and COPPA. She has contributed to privacy compliance work across multiple mobile applications. At Suntongames she owns the privacy stance — no sign-ups, no third-party trackers beyond ad networks, anonymous aggregate analytics only — and writes about how the platform is engineered to collect as little data as possible while still operating sustainably.
Areas of Expertise
- Data Privacy
- Ad Compliance
- User Rights
- GDPR / UU PDP / COPPA
Specialty & Expertise
Maya specializes in player behavior research, usability testing, and the psychology of game satisfaction. Her work bridges cognitive science and product design — running unmoderated playtests, analyzing drop-off patterns, and translating qualitative feedback into concrete design changes. She has built the Suntongames research practice from scratch, including the player survey program and the weekly usability review cadence that every shipped title passes through before release. Her research informs both product decisions and the platform's privacy stance, ensuring that even anonymous, aggregate data yields actionable insight. She also runs a quarterly satisfaction benchmarking study that tracks how players feel about the catalog as a whole over time.
Research Focus
Her current research explores flow theory in casual gaming, the completion drive that pushes players to finish one more level, and the design of visible progress mechanics — score, streaks, level maps — that feel motivating rather than manipulative. She is particularly interested in how short-session puzzle games can deliver meaningful satisfaction without exploiting player attention or relying on engagement loops that punish players for putting the game down.
Design Philosophy
"Games should respect the player's time and intelligence."
Focus Areas
- Flow theory in casual gaming and the conditions that produce it on mobile
- Completion drive — what makes players finish one more level, and when it becomes coercive
- Visible progress mechanics that motivate without exploiting attention
- Usability testing for touch-first puzzle interfaces on entry-level hardware
- Privacy-preserving research methods using anonymous, aggregate data only
Background
Maya holds a cognitive psychology degree from the University of Indonesia and brings 5 years of UX research experience to her role at Suntongames. Before joining the team, she ran usability research for consumer mobile apps, where she developed her framework for measuring perceived effort in short-session experiences. At Suntongames she pairs her research background with the platform's privacy commitments — every study runs on anonymous, aggregate data only, and no player is ever asked to sign up to provide feedback. She also leads internal education on consent design and the ethical use of behavioral data across the product and engineering teams.
Published Articles
Maya's published writing on the Suntongames blog covers the psychology of puzzle satisfaction, the platform's privacy stance, and the design of combo-driven match-3 experiences. Her articles translate research findings into language casual players can use to understand why certain games feel better to play than others.