Play Console X Eco System
Period
1 year 3 months
Team
Malvika Nanda
Yun Easing
Riya Ghosh
Role
Product Designer
Skills
Design Systems
Component Architecture
Product Strategy
Tools
Figma
Photoshop
GM3 Design System
Context
The platform's "Loyalty Points" program is a powerful tool that drives significant user engagement. Historically, however, getting an app featured was a manual, opaque process brokered by Business Development (BD) managers, accessible only to the top 1% of managed partners. This left 99% of developers without access to a critical growth lever. The challenge was to dismantle this manual, inequitable process and re-architect it as a scalable, self-service product.
What if any developer could launch a global promotion on the App Store?
The Problem
The brief provided by the client is to make the promotion feature simpler for devs as currently the growth engine was throttled by a manual process. It became immediately clear that the system was fundamentally broken and unscalable, creating friction for everyone involved.
Pain Points
Systemic Inequity
The manual process was a bottleneck by design. It was impossible to scale the human-led negotiations beyond the largest partners, creating a "rich get richer" dynamic on the platform that left the long-tail of developers behind.
Internal Operational Drain
The BD team was spending the majority of their time on low-value operational tasks—endless email chains, contract negotiations, and manual campaign setup. This prevented them from focusing on high-impact strategic partnerships.
Black Box Process
For the few developers who could get a deal, the process was entirely opaque. They had no direct control over the campaign, no visibility into setup, and no immediate access to performance data, leading to frustration and a feeling of powerlessness.
Key Insight
The core problem was not the promotions, but the manual gatekeeping. The only way to unlock growth for the entire ecosystem was to remove the human bottleneck and productise the entire workflow.
The Design Process
Designing for confidence in a high-stakes environment The design process was focused on a single, critical question: "How do we make a developer feel confident making important, irreversible decisions in a self-service tool?" Every design decision was made to build trust and provide clarity.
1. Mapping End-to-End Journey
Creating a detailed service blueprint that mapped every action and dependency for both the external developer and the internal teams. This artifact was crucial; it visually articulated the immense cost of the manual process and became the central justification for investing in a self-service product.
2. Architecting the "Guided Wizard"
A complex B2B process demands a simple, guided interface. I designed the campaign creation flow as a step-by-step wizard (Goal → Type → Budget & Schedule → Review). This linear approach prevents users from feeling overwhelmed.
3. Unhappy Path: Edge Cases & Empty States
A robust system is defined by how gracefully it handles failure and empty states. I dedicated a significant part of the design process to mapping and solving for these "unhappy paths" to prevent user confusion and errors.
The Solution
The "Promote with Loyalty Points" feature transforms a manual service into a fully integrated, self-service product, designed with safety and clarity at its core.
1. Introduction of "PlayPoints" in Dashboard
"Total revenue" tooltip on hover
2. Empty State
3. Creation Flow
4. Coupons
4. Rejected Promotion › Edit Mode
Reflection
If I were to continue this project, I would focus on building an AI-powered "Recommendation Engine." The system has all the data on what makes a promotion successful. The next logical step is to use that data to proactively suggest campaigns to developers: "Apps in your category see a 30% user uplift with a 'Points Booster' in Japan. Estimated cost: $5,000. Would you like to set one up?" This would evolve the feature from a powerful self-service tool into a true strategic growth partner.