Case Study 01 · Head of UX, Amazon Appstore
One store across every surface
Selling apps and subscriptions across devices, mobile, PC, and the car — and deciding when to be a brand and when to disappear.
I led UX for the Amazon Appstore as a two-sided marketplace — setting strategy across the consumer store, the developer portal, and marketing, and building the team and practice that delivered it. Reporting into a General Manager, part of my job was showing organizations new to a mature design team how to partner with design: establishing process, design-thinking and ideation practices, and incremental agile plans, while operating as program manager and design ops. I set direction and coached the senior and junior design leads who did much of the hands-on work, ran design reviews, and partnered closely with product managers, device partners, and researchers — stepping in hands-on where we were short on resources.
The Two-Sided Marketplace
One submission becomes the whole storefront
I owned both sides — the developer portal where partners publish, and the on-device store customers buy from. Every field a developer fills maps to a moment a customer sees.
Store-listing form
Browse + Detail page
Subscription form
Subscription cards on device
Cross-Device · Ecosystem
One store, every surface
The same store, obligated to work across radically different devices. The craft was deciding where to unify and where to diverge — each surface tuned to its own physics without fragmenting the whole.
10-foot, remote-driven
Content-forward, D-pad selection.
Touch, dense browse
Utility-forward arrays.
One-handed
Thumb-zone, instant pay.
Standalone app
iOS + Android.
PC game play
Co-branded trust for auth.
Invisible utility
Native to the console.
Retail channel
Sell where they shop.
Category 01
Acquisition & Discovery
Acquisition doesn't happen in one place — a customer might arrive from a content tile, an app tile, the homepage, search, or the web. I led the strategy for a discovery system where every one of those is a path to subscribe, and where the purchase moment is as close to frictionless as the platform allows.
A hundred clicks, down to three
A one-click subscribe flow that collapsed a hundred-click journey down to three — straight from the app detail screen, using the customer's permission to reuse their Amazon account and payment.
Mapping the QuickSubs flow
Mapped the end-to-end journey to find where remote clicks could be removed without losing clarity or compliance.
Three-click subscribe on Fire TV
Plan, price, and payment inline; one-tap confirmation; a clean success state.
One-click, every surface
Wireframed how the pattern extends to Amazon.com and every device.
The Amazon.com subscribe flow
Inline plans, a subscribe-and-deliver modal, and a setup screen.
Web proved it — devices followed
Early and hands-on: I designed the premium detail page and email campaign that lifted sales 33% — the proof that funded a bigger bet on devices, and the content strategy that inspired the device detail-page redesign.
Discovery on device
Beyond the purchase moment — how customers find and control their apps.
"Your apps & channels"
A customizable app nav. When the 2026 redesign removed it, the criticism validated the call.
Eket targeted offers
Search "The Bear," see a Hulu-tied offer. Developers opt in via the portal.
Browse redesigns across surfaces
The hands-on craft underneath, tuned per device.
Browse redesign
Before → after.
Browse redesign
Before → after.
Offers / Sales page
Before → after.
Category 02
Monetization & Conversion
How subscriptions get packaged and paid for. I led the design of the mechanics that grow attach and retention — and because each has a developer-config side and a consumer-purchase side, this is where the two-sided marketplace shows up in the work.
Add-ons
Hands-on design: a parent subscription plus affiliate content apps to add on. Peacock + NBC Sports was our first — and sales went well. The platform aligns the add-on to the customer's existing billing cycle in one click.
Bundles
Multiple subscriptions in one (Disney + Hulu + ESPN) — value for the customer, retention for the partner.
Uni Payment
[fill: one-line function — unified checkout across purchase types].
Customer Choice Billing
[fill: one-line function — customer choice in how they're billed].
Category 03
Retention & Management
The industry makes canceling almost intentionally hard. I led the opposite bet — transparent, self-service management — and turned a legal requirement into a customer-first differentiator.
Easy to cancel, by design
We met the 2-click cancel law with a clean on-device flow — where most competitors make cancellation hardest — and paired it with smart retention, so honest cancellation and retention could coexist.
Transparent management
Manage-and-cancel on the web; the hard part was discoverability and execution in a category that buries both.
Retention, winback & survey
The full set of paths mapped across many happy and unhappy use cases.
Category 04 deep-dive → own page later
The Persuasion Page, across devices
The detail page is where a browse becomes a purchase. I led the strategy for a persuasion model built around the content that actually decides a customer — then proved it and scaled it across every device team.
Prove it, then scale it
We proved the redesign on Tablet with higher conversion, I took the data to leadership, and then evangelized every device team to adopt the same pattern — one persuasion model, tuned per surface.
Mapping every path
All happy and unhappy paths, so it held across edge cases.
Hollywood
Re-solved for a much smaller viewport.
The 10-foot page
Wireframes through final mocks.
Across the ecosystem
Auto, web, and Amazon mobile.
Category 05 deep-dive → own page later
Brand & Marketing
The Appstore had no brand identity — and a dozen siloed teams and three global markets who disagreed on whether it should. I led the research and cross-team alignment that produced the answer, then took it to market.
The brand decision
A fractured landscape aligned around one call: a strong, guideline-backed brand for 3P and marketing, and a deliberate utility role for 1P — validated when the Fire TV release buried the Appstore's ingress and drew exactly the criticism we'd predicted.
Make the case
A deck across every siloed team + a workshop invite.
Workshop
Co-facilitated with research, design, partners, customers.
Sprint + visual language
Concepts, prototypes, CD-led Web/Tablet exploration.
3P brand + guidelines
Amazon.com pages + guidelines for every team.
Taking it to market
One visual language across ads, devices, and campaigns.
Campaign, on air
Before → after ads (Mobile + Windows).
Template → CMS → Platform
Building blocks so marketers ship their own pages.
Category 06 deep-dive → own page later
Global / Localization — Points
When Japan needed its own loyalty currency, I led the migration from Coins to Points — a market-specific product judgment delivered as a full localized ecosystem.
Coins → Points
Amazon Japan already ran on Points, the currency local customers knew. I led the move to migrate Coins users to Points — retaining them while aligning to the market's established behavior.
Coins → Points
Retain Japan's engaged base by aligning to Points.
The Points economy
Pay, spend, deficit, add, detail-page education.
Marketing & global
Cross-region alignment before build.
Web, Tablet, Mobile
Translated, adapted per surface.
Results
What the work moved
Market context (the stage, not my win): 1-click flows lift trial conversion ~2–3× industry-wide (Flurry / industry). Fire TV ~36% of US connected-TV; ~310M Appstore users. Sourced; kept separate from my own numbers.
What it shows
Consumer and business strategy at the level executives care about — acquisition, monetization, brand, and the judgment to make different calls on different surfaces without losing coherence, plus turning regulation into a competitive edge. Across all of it I owned both sides of the marketplace and built the team, practice, and partnerships that shipped it. Ecosystems and platforms, not pages.