Eightball is a Berlin-based gaming startup developing immersive, browser-based multiplayer games that blend nostalgia with modern design.
Company
Oral B x Amazon
Timeline
2023
—
2025
Role
UI / UX Designer & Frontend Developer
Duration
Team
Overview
Eightball set out to revive the charm of old-school arcade culture but for a new generation of players who expect seamless multiplayer, responsive design, and social integration. They wanted a platform that not only hosted their games but also fostered community—leaderboards, chat, and friend systems included. Elliot’s role was to design a UI that balanced playfulness with usability, ensuring the platform felt like a modern social hub while still evoking the raw, neon-drenched vibe of arcade nostalgia. The end goal wasn’t just functionality but creating an experience that made users want to hang around even when they weren’t actively playing.
Challenge
The biggest hurdle was handling contrast—visually, functionally, and emotionally. Retro aesthetics can easily slip into feeling outdated if not handled carefully, while modern UI trends can clash with the boldness of arcade design. Finding the sweet spot required experimentation with color systems, typography, and motion design. On the technical side, integrating real-time features like multiplayer lobbies, friend invites, and live chat demanded close collaboration with Eightball’s backend team. Elliot had to ensure the front-end felt effortless, no matter the device or connection speed, while still carrying the richness of an arcade-inspired design system.
Alexa+ set out to change this by replacing command-based interactions with natural, contextual conversations. This introduced a new UI challenge: how do you design an interface for conversations that are different every time?
Working closely with UX designers, voice designers and engineers, I helped create a scalable, component-driven UI system that could adapt to evolving AI responses, surface relevant content and follow-up actions, and seamlessly bridge voice and touch while preserving clarity and conversational context across the Alexa ecosystem.
Designing the foundation
The programme began with an intensive cross-functional vision phase involving Product, UX, Voice Design, Engineering, Research and Content Design. Together, we defined Alexa+'s conversational principles, interaction model and long-term product vision.
Over the following 18 months, multiple teams worked in parallel to transform those principles into production-ready experiences. Through continuous prototyping, customer testing and close collaboration across disciplines, we refined interaction patterns, validated new concepts and evolved a shared design system capable of supporting an expanding set of AI-powered experiences.
Option 01. Conversation View as a panel over native UI.
Option 02. Agent embedded in a left-hand nav rail.
Option 03. Floating Action Button above all UI.
Option 4. Mid-fidelity concept. Widgets, content and smart home in one view.
Final design before public launch interface.
The result was a scalable, component-driven UI framework centred around adaptive cards. Designed to accommodate dynamic AI responses, the system surfaces relevant content, recommendations, contextual information and next actions while preserving clarity throughout the conversation. It creates a seamless bridge between voice and touch, providing a flexible foundation that scales consistently across mobile, Echo devices, Fire TV and the web.
200M+ Prime members reached with the global launch of Alexa+.
Post-Launch Challenges
Customers who subscribed to Alexa Plus were overwhelmed into a long and un-intuitive onboarding process, requiring them to set up features that did not align with their goals (i.e Motivation).
Without understanding customer motivations, such as why they subscribed to Alexa Plus, the onboarding experience felt unfulfilling and unintentional. It was like shooting a dart blindly in the dark, hoping it hits the target.
Post-Launch Challenges
Customers who subscribed to Alexa Plus were overwhelmed into a long and un-intuitive onboarding process, requiring them to set up features that did not align with their goals (i.e Motivation)
Eightball is a Berlin-based gaming startup developing immersive, browser-based multiplayer games that blend nostalgia with modern design.
Company
Oral B x Amazon
Timeline
2023
—
2025
Role
UI / UX Designer & Frontend Developer
Duration
Team
Overview
Eightball set out to revive the charm of old-school arcade culture but for a new generation of players who expect seamless multiplayer, responsive design, and social integration. They wanted a platform that not only hosted their games but also fostered community—leaderboards, chat, and friend systems included. Elliot’s role was to design a UI that balanced playfulness with usability, ensuring the platform felt like a modern social hub while still evoking the raw, neon-drenched vibe of arcade nostalgia. The end goal wasn’t just functionality but creating an experience that made users want to hang around even when they weren’t actively playing.
Challenge
The biggest hurdle was handling contrast—visually, functionally, and emotionally. Retro aesthetics can easily slip into feeling outdated if not handled carefully, while modern UI trends can clash with the boldness of arcade design. Finding the sweet spot required experimentation with color systems, typography, and motion design. On the technical side, integrating real-time features like multiplayer lobbies, friend invites, and live chat demanded close collaboration with Eightball’s backend team. Elliot had to ensure the front-end felt effortless, no matter the device or connection speed, while still carrying the richness of an arcade-inspired design system.
Alexa+ set out to change this by replacing command-based interactions with natural, contextual conversations. This introduced a new UI challenge: how do you design an interface for conversations that are different every time?
Working closely with UX designers, voice designers and engineers, I helped create a scalable, component-driven UI system that could adapt to evolving AI responses, surface relevant content and follow-up actions, and seamlessly bridge voice and touch while preserving clarity and conversational context across the Alexa ecosystem.
Designing the foundation
The programme began with an intensive cross-functional vision phase involving Product, UX, Voice Design, Engineering, Research and Content Design. Together, we defined Alexa+'s conversational principles, interaction model and long-term product vision.
Over the following 18 months, multiple teams worked in parallel to transform those principles into production-ready experiences. Through continuous prototyping, customer testing and close collaboration across disciplines, we refined interaction patterns, validated new concepts and evolved a shared design system capable of supporting an expanding set of AI-powered experiences.
Option 01. Conversation View as a panel over native UI.
Option 02. Agent embedded in a left-hand nav rail.
Option 03. Floating Action Button above all UI.
Option 4. Mid-fidelity concept. Widgets, content and smart home in one view.
Final design before public launch interface.
The result was a scalable, component-driven UI framework centred around adaptive cards. Designed to accommodate dynamic AI responses, the system surfaces relevant content, recommendations, contextual information and next actions while preserving clarity throughout the conversation. It creates a seamless bridge between voice and touch, providing a flexible foundation that scales consistently across mobile, Echo devices, Fire TV and the web.
200M+ Prime members reached with the global launch of Alexa+.
Post-Launch Challenges
Customers who subscribed to Alexa Plus were overwhelmed into a long and un-intuitive onboarding process, requiring them to set up features that did not align with their goals (i.e Motivation).
Without understanding customer motivations, such as why they subscribed to Alexa Plus, the onboarding experience felt unfulfilling and unintentional. It was like shooting a dart blindly in the dark, hoping it hits the target.
Post-Launch Challenges
Customers who subscribed to Alexa Plus were overwhelmed into a long and un-intuitive onboarding process, requiring them to set up features that did not align with their goals (i.e Motivation)