DREST
Status By Design
Art Direction
+
UX/UI Design
+
Visual Asset Production
+
Stakeholder Management
+
Dev Governance
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Art Direction + UX/UI Design + Visual Asset Production + Stakeholder Management + Dev Governance +
THE NORTH STAR
“The Gaming Fast Track - every action earns status, every spend unlocks an edge, and the destination is always visible”
THE BRIEF
The Vision & Challenge
As Creative and Design Director, I led a comprehensive evolution of Drest's product structure, shifting the platform from a fragmented series of user sessions into a highly retentive, luxury-aligned ecosystem.
Although the platform had successfully scaled to over a million players, the core experience was entirely episodic, nothing accumulated, nothing felt earned, and users could win without ever engaging with the internal economy. Leveraging a critical migration to the Unity platform as the team's catalyst, my role was to steer product design and strategy beyond simple monetisation fixes and to build a progression architecture with senior stakeholders, in which every interface and mechanic connected to a single, felt journey.
By directing the UX/UI team to make the player's destination visible and to visualise intuitive, rich gaming interfaces, I realised the unified product framework. This successfully bridged habit-forming consumer UX with a repeatable gaming loop, proving that every moment spent on the platform was worth the player's time.
THE WORK
Three Mechanics, One Connected System
User Progression Panel
01
Driving Player Retention Through a Unified Progression Framework
To address early session directionlessness and simplify a complex core progression loop, we re-architected the game’s primary player dashboard. By consolidating scattered metrics - including earned stars, community likes, and high-tier styling milestones into a unified interface, we seamlessly aligned achievable daily targets with competitive weekly league leaderboards. This design pass transformed ambiguous skill tracking into a transparent, habit-forming ecosystem that successfully balanced player styling quality with long-term engagement and behavioural investment.
Bonus Bar Redesigned
02
Maximising In-Game Monetisation Through Gamified UX
The "Bonus Bar" mechanic underperformed because players found the feedback loop confusing and missed reward animations. We rearchitected the 2025 interface into a high-visibility solution inspired by a camera-lens control, leaning into the concept of capturing the perfect shot. By amplifying real-time animations and adding a contextual info anchor, we eliminated friction and clearly communicated the value of high-tier items, driving a substantial lift in look-submission values and bonus multipliers among premium spenders.
Improved Narrative Quests
03
Scaling Luxury Partnerships Through Design Infrastructure
Following a core engine migration to Unity, we rearchitected our interactive features from scratch to build a high-fidelity B2B pitching framework. By systemising the onboarding process with modular Figma templates and brand asset guidelines, we successfully secured and launched campaigns for iconic legacy houses like Cartier, Versace, and Alexander McQueen - ultimately unlocking over 41 million product try-ons and outperforming initial interaction forecasts.
THE IMPACT
Three Results One System
