§01
2021 — 2022
Foundations
Apprenticeship under the Principal. Install flows, full-screen, airplane mode, plus the MSI co-brand build. Sprint cadence on the unglamorous middle, on top of a 500M+ install base.
VIEW
Four years.Ten surfaces.One tenure.
— What I owned
From Cloud Era onward: BSX, Console Mode, Game Browser, Payments SDK, Ads, Weapon-Switch proto, Moments, Mobile, and the design seed that became 6labs.
— Worked with
Principal Designer + 1 designer early — solo from 2022. Then PMs, Eng leads, and SDK team across 10 surfaces over 4 years.
FIG. 01 / OVERVIEW
bluestacks · b2c gaming
2021 — 2025
● 4 YEARS · 10 SURFACES
BlueStacks
§00Tenure, in numbers.2021 → 2025
4 YRS
Tenure across two role tiers
2021 → 2025. Promoted to Senior in March 2024.
500M+
App Player users, 200+ countries
The install base every shipped surface had to live inside.
10
Surfaces shipped or shaped
Across desktop, cloud, TV, mobile, web, and SDK — listed below.
Joined as the second designer in 2021. From the Cloud Era onward (2022 →), the surface load shifted to me solo — BSX, Console Mode, the dual-theme Payments SDK, the Moments capture-and-share canvas (which became the foundation of 6labs), and eventually the BlueStacks Mobile app. Promoted to Senior in 2024. The tenure's shape: apprenticeship → cloud systems → revenue surfaces → mobile.
§02
2022 — 2023
Cloud Era
Solo from here. BlueStacks X (Windows app store + design system), Console Mode (TV + native controller), plus one unshipped surface — Game Browser — whose pattern landed elsewhere later.
§03
2023 — 2024
Revenue & Craft
One Payments SDK with a dual-theme system shipped to two products (BlueStacks + now.gg). Six ad placements that monetised without feeling monetised. Plus the Weapon Switch interactive prototype — pure craft.
§04
2024 — 2025
Moments & Mobile
Moments — a 60-second capture-and-share canvas that quietly became the seed of 6labs. Then the solo-built BlueStacks Mobile app + partner-facing now SDK, post-promotion.
§01Foundations. Sprint tickets and small features.2021 — 2022
A product shipping to 500M people doesn't let a new designer learn on it. Foundations was the apprenticeship — you earn the right to touch load-bearing surfaces by getting the small ones right first. Year one under the Principal, learning the install funnel and the user base before changing anything that could break them.
The work itself was sprint cadence: PM tickets, data-driven micro-fixes, install-flow optimisation, full-screen mode, airplane mode. None of it portfolio-shaped on its own. All of it the muscle that made the solo Cloud Era run possible.
The era's most visible deliverable was the MSI co-brand build — App Player skinned and bundled for every MSI gaming PC, executing on a partnership that already had MSI as an investor. Lower glamour than “design closed the deal,” higher leverage than any single feature — every new MSI machine shipped with the App Player our team built.
FIG. 02 · Year-one composite — install flow, full-screen, airplane mode, MSI co-brand
About this: two years of incremental wins stitched together — Game Booster panel, fullscreen toggles, the MSI App Player co-brand variant, the installer milestones. The unglamorous middle, where the muscle was built.2021 — 2022
Shipped:Install-flow v2Full-screen modeAirplane modeGame Booster panelInstaller milestonesMSI co-brand build
§02Cloud Era. BSX app, design system, three surface bets.2022 — 2023
The AppPlayer 5 → 5.5 inflection — a million-DAU jump in 18 months — meant we couldn't keep shipping with screen-by-screen mocks. The system became the bottleneck. Cloud Era was the answer: BSX, its design system, and three surface bets that all had to share primitives.
— 02.A / BlueStacks X
A single front door for two catalogues.
Mobile gaming was booming, and the cloud tech we'd already built made those games playable on any device — desktop, browser, TV. The App Player already had hundreds of millions of mobile-game users. BSX gave them the single front door to the combined catalogue: every mobile title running on App Player and every cloud title streaming via now.gg, in one Windows store. Browse, discovery, launch — and a design system built from scratch to hold the surface together as it scaled to TV and controller next.
“One store, two ways to play — App Player on desktop, now.gg cloud on any device. BSX was the front and the system holding it together.”
Home
A catalogue to play and discover games — for App Player on desktop and now.gg cloud in the browser. Region-based popular rails and category filters surface what's hot locally; a deals layer threads IAP discounts and premium-for-free offers through the browse, so players can access paid titles without the purchase wall.
Premium Games
A dedicated surface for paid titles, free to play — including locked levels across many games unlocked without purchase. The reward-orb pattern frames each game card; same DS primitives as Home, retuned for a streaming-first browsing pattern.
Game Detail
One detail page, every install or play destination — App Player, browser cloud, Line, mobile. The “play anywhere from one platform” promise of BSX, made visible: same components on every channel, with the routing logic sitting underneath rather than in the layout.— 02.B / Console Mode
The catalogue, redesigned for 10-foot viewing.
With the cloud tech we'd built, BlueStacks could run on any device — and the next obvious market was the living room. TV-native gamers don't have a PC, but they have a controller and a screen. Console Mode was the BSX catalogue redesigned for 10-foot viewing and a controller-first interaction model. Designed end-to-end in Figma — controller mapping, HUD overlays, focus states, the works.
TV Launcher
Focus-driven game tiles sized for a 10-foot living-room read — the same DS, retuned for distance and remote-control navigation.
Controller HUD
Mapped button hints surfaced contextually mid-game so players never lose the “Back + RB to home” affordance — input-aware overlay, not a static legend.02.C · Decision
Game Browser — the bet on a pattern, not a surface.
An in-product discovery surface inside the App Player. Prototyped, never shipped — the user signal was real, but the feed-based discovery pattern that captured it ended up being Moments. The Game Browser surface died; the bet underneath it survived in a different room.
Takeaway: Bet on the pattern, not the surface.
Game Browser
Onboarding and welcome flow for a discovery surface inside the App Player itself — benefits walked through with interactive animations, plus quick-access tabs with every gaming-related site pinned.§03Revenue & Craft. Money, ads, and one favorite Figma file.2023 — 2024
Cloud-bandwidth costs caught up with us, and the era's job shifted from catalogue to revenue. Payments first — flows that had to convert on first attempt across two products with very different brands. Ads second — six placements that had to make money without breaking trust. Plus one craft side-quest that shipped the same day Figma did.
— 03.A / Payments SDK
Two products, one SDK — and the user can't tell.
BlueStacks AppPlayer (gamer-utility, deep blue) and now.gg (cloud-streaming, vivid pink) had to share an SDK because finance + compliance ruled out parallel codebases. The risk: if the flow felt borrowed in either product, users would notice the seam and conversion would crater on the first failed transaction. I proposed a dual-theme system — identical IA, identical micro-copy, identical fail/success states; theme tokens swap at the entry point. The SDK ships once; each product feels like its own.
“One payments flow, two product themes — the user doesn't notice. That's the whole job.”
Full-flow strip
Entry to confirmation — the checkout journey end-to-end, the same flow rendered identically across both product themes.
Dual-theme hero
Side-by-side: the same flow rendered in BlueStacks theme and in now.gg theme. Identical IA, identical micro-copy, identical states — only the tokens swap at the entry point.
Variable tokens
Themed for both BlueStacks and now.gg surfaces — the wiring under every screen. One spec, two products, no rewrite.
Cashback Rewards
An engaging, gamified experience built natively into the SDK — capsules, gift boxes, glow loops — rewarding users for paying across our products through a mix of cashback and reward mechanisms.Spin wheels, jackpots, red envelopes, nowBux rewards — extends into the Gamification case study →
— 03.B / Ads
Six places to put an ad. Pick the ones that don't make the user hate you.
Ad surfaces threaded through the user journey — CPI ads on boot, an Ads Panel on home, video ads, fullscreen pre-rolls on game launch. The brief was monetisation; the constraint was retention. Every placement was an explicit trade between revenue per session and the probability the user closes the app and doesn't come back. The work was less about visuals and more about which six of the twenty possible slots the product could afford to use.
Journey map
Where ads sit across boot → home → game launch → in-game. Placement decisions made visible before any creative was specced.
Home Ads Panel
Every ad slot — sidebar, downloaded, playable, display — mapped across the gameplay screens that frame them.
Launch-experience ads
Ads integrated through the product launch experience — video and static creatives on the boot loader, pre-roll on game launch (Alienware creative shown), and floating windows on home. Sized for full-bleed without breaking the surrounding chrome.— Interlude / Craft side-quest
Weapon Switch on Scroll — shipped the day Figma did.
A working interactive prototype of weapon-switching with scroll input — variables, scroll counters, conditional sets, no code. Built and shipped on the same day Figma launched Conditional Prototyping at Config 2023. Pure craft, no business case, in the case study because it's still my favourite Figma file.
The prototype
Scroll-up / scroll-down flips the active weapon mid-fight. Variables, scroll counters, conditional sets — built in Figma, no code.
Figma interaction logic
Variables, scroll counters, conditional sets — every state mapped before a single line of code. Shipped the same day Figma did.§04Moments & Mobile. The promotion-era stuff.2024 — 2025
— 04.A / Moments
Borrowed plays. Could social do for App Player what NVIDIA Highlights did for GPUs?
Acquiring players through paid channels was getting expensive. NVIDIA Highlights had quietly proven the alternate route — a 60-second clip of your best play, sharing one keystroke away, creators pulling the next cohort in for free. App Player already recorded video; the capability existed, the experiment was whether the behaviour would. Moments was that test — capture mode (CTRL + M), a gallery, an in-browser editor sized for vertical export, and a public share page on now.gg/play. Not a researched user pain — a stakeholder bet on a validated external playbook, run on what we already had.
“60 seconds, one shortcut, one shareable link — borrowed from NVIDIA, run on what App Player already had.”
In-game capture overlay
The moment the experiment goes live — CTRL + M brings up the capture controls inside any running session.
Gallery
Captures, recordings, screenshots — every empty and error state covered.
Flow
Every screen, every modal, every save / cancel branch mapped end-to-end.
now.gg/play public share
In-browser trim and crop, sized for vertical export to TikTok and Shorts.
AI Highlights
Auto-captured highlights and the activity timeline — the seed of what became 6labs.What it gathered. The clip-capture, gallery, and share-page surfaces produced something more interesting than the engagement numbers — a dataset on what gamers actually wanted to capture, edit, and share, plus the behavioural model behind it. That dataset became the backbone of 6labs — the analytics-grade gameplay-capture product spun up in 2024 for game studios. Moments was the experiment; 6labs is what the data justified building.
— 04.B / BlueStacks Mobile
Crossing devices. The SDK catalogue was big enough — time to be where the players were.
Three years of cloud and SDK work had produced a real Android catalogue. The bet for the mobile app: meet players on the device they already had in their pocket, and let them carry their App Player progress with them when they walked away from the desk. Two value props, one app — continue your game on mobile and discover your next game on mobile. Designed solo end-to-end across three iteration cuts, each testing a different premise.
“Cross-device progress, on-the-go play — solo design across three iteration cuts.”
Three iterations
Alpha → public release → PlayPal-integrated. The mobile app's spine, three cuts.Iteration 1 — Alpha. The bridge. Prove the cross-device promise. A list of your downloaded App Player games, a download button, shared save state with the desktop. No store, no rewards, no discovery — just: does the bridge between desktop and mobile actually work, and do players use it? It did, and they did.
Iteration 2 — First public release. The store. Become a real store. Personalised feed, rewards, deals, new-game discovery, favourites — plus the full Android branding system and every asset the platform demanded (store listings, splash, notifications, system icons, the full kit). The first cut where mobile was a destination, not a companion.
Core screens
Home with nowBux and other crypto currency linked to the same now.gg account, plus a game-offers feed driven by installed and favourited titles. A Games tab with a discover list and an installed-games library toggle. A Community tab integrating wsup.ai — the AI chat-partner child product from our company.
Personalised hooks
Game offer cards tuned to installed and recently played titles, dedicated offers and promotions slots on home and game pages, plus an app-exit hook that routes users back to discovery, rewards, and offers via illustration.Iteration 3 — PlayPal + App Player linkage. The monetised loop and the live bridge. Two adds in one cut. PlayPal — the gamification program that pays players real cash for completing tasks, with the loop designed to drive in-app purchases — built to lift ROAS for the mobile app. Alongside it, an App Player notification feature: pair a desktop App Player instance to the mobile app and get real-time pings from your games on the phone — time to collect resources in your farming game, or your shield is about to drop in your base-builder. Together they pulled the app from "store" into "live extension of your desktop play, with a payout layer." The full design of PlayPal is its own story — covered in the Gamification case study.
PlayPal Mobile + App Player pings
Real-money reward gamification — full game registration, progress, and cashout from inside the app. Plus the App Player notification feature: link a desktop instance to the phone and receive live game-state alerts (farming resources ready, base-builder shield expiring, raid timers) so cross-device play stays present even when you're away from the PC.1M+
Total installs
Across the three iterations from alpha through PlayPal launch.
~4K
Daily installs at steady-state
After PlayPal launched and the monetised loop started lifting ROAS.
~$600
Daily IAP spend on Mobile
Steady-state daily IAP volume on the BlueStacks Mobile app.
§05What four years actually taught me.Honest closing
Four years at BlueStacks looked like ten different jobs stacked together. The first year was install flows and full-screen toggles — the kind of work no one frames on a wall. By year two, I was designing the BSX app, its design system, and three new surface bets simultaneously. By year four, I was designing an Android app end-to-end and watching the data behind a feature I'd shipped (Moments) become the foundation for what would become 6labs.
The lesson nobody told me on day one: tenure isn't a line, it's a layered cake. You ship sprint tickets until you stop noticing them, then one day you've designed for 500 million people across desktop, cloud, TV, mobile, and the web — and the work itself is the only thing that compounds.
- 01
Self-imposed constraints win.
The dual-theme requirement on the Payments SDK was the best constraint I ever proposed for myself — if it works in two products at once, it works. One spec, two brands, every decision tested twice before it shipped.
- 02
Craft compounds in public.
The Weapon Switch proto I built on the day Figma launched Conditional Prototyping is still, embarrassingly, my favourite Figma file. No business case, pure craft — and it taught me more about variables and conditional sets than any sprint ticket would.
- 03
Side projects aren't small.
Moments shouldn't have been a side project. We knew. The data behind it seeded 6labs — the analytics-grade product that justified spinning up a new company surface in 2024. The clip-and-share experiment was load-bearing the whole time.
- 01
Document the unglamorous work.
A year of sprint tickets compounds into expertise but disappears from your portfolio. Install flows, full-screen toggles, every quiet polish pass — capture it as it happens. The case study is harder to write retroactively than to keep up.
- 02
Pitch the side project sooner.
Moments-as-a-product was visible from year three. The data showing what creators actually shared, edited and watched was already telling the story — I should have made the case for spinning it out a year earlier than we did. The cost of delay was a year of slower learning loops.
- 03
The DS was the real unlock.
BSX shipped across three surfaces — desktop, TV, controller — because the design system held. That's leverage, not luck. I treated the DS as infrastructure-for-myself; should have framed and pitched it as company infrastructure earlier so it earned its own roadmap rather than living inside the BSX one.
— NEXT · Case 07 — Selected Work · 2020 → 2021