PlayStation Now is PlayStation's game streaming subscription service and an early entry into the market. When I joined, the space was still taking shape — streaming gaming hadn't yet gone mainstream, and the opportunity to define what a premium experience in this category could look like was wide open. I was the lead UX Designer, leading a team of four across research and design.
Streaming gaming presents unique design complexity. Discovery, onboarding, and game launch flows carry higher stakes than traditional app experiences — and gameplay itself raises the bar even further, where latency, input responsiveness, and session continuity are design considerations that don't exist in standard digital products. Friction that might be tolerable elsewhere becomes a reason to churn in a subscription service.
The primary goal was to grow the subscriber base by delivering an experience worthy of the service's potential. That meant designing thoughtfully around the specific considerations of a streaming product across every touchpoint, from discovery through active play. Expanding to PC was a secondary strategy — opening PlayStation Now to an entirely new platform and audience to further accelerate that growth.
Leading this team meant navigating the full complexity of a streaming service. We partnered closely with network engineers, software engineers, and embedded device engineers to understand constraints and identify the right paths to resolution. Working closely with product management, we shaped the roadmap together, making sure research and user needs informed strategy from the start. I oriented the team around the customer journey — bringing in jobs-to-be-done thinking to break down user needs into actionable stories, setting up experimentation to test engagement, and finding new ways for customers to discover and try games.
Key experience improvements:
The PC expansion was the most strategically significant work in this role. Designing PlayStation Now for PC meant building without an established PlayStation design language for the platform, navigating OS-level interaction considerations, supporting dual input modes across controller and mouse, and shipping a streaming gaming client built on the Electron framework. We built something that felt like a premium product — native to PC while staying true to the PlayStation experience.
Console players expect one thing: launch a game and just play. On PC, we had to honor that and push beyond it. Leverage what the platform uniquely offers, stay true to PlayStation, and make the shift from mouse to immersive console experience feel natural.