Yandex Cloud
A touchscreen game for a conference booth
Yandex Cloud wanted its booth at Yandex Scale 2026 to show what its 20+ data services are for, pull visitors into the merch contest and bring in leads.
I designed a touchscreen game about its data platform. A visitor picks a business task on a 55-inch screen and puts together the services that solve it.
I also built the front end myself, with Claude Code. Design and front end took a week and a half, and the production version was built on my code.
- Role
- Senior designer, design and front end
- Team
- Art director · Yandex Cloud’s product lead and designer · contractor’s engineers
- Timeline
- August to September 2026
- Outcome
- Ran at the booth · production built on my code
I came in through Rabotyagi Studio, which designs for Yandex. The back end and the production build were on the contractor’s side.
Make it work for someone passing by
People stop at a booth for a minute or two, and someone is already waiting behind them. Nobody reads instructions. So every screen had to explain itself.
The tasks are real business problems and need a few sentences. Everything else had to work without any text.
There are two modes: “Build it yourself”, where you put the chain together, and “Choose from ready-made”, where you pick one of three bundles. The second is shorter and earns points for the merch contest.
Every task has two minutes. When time runs out, the game doesn’t tell you that you lost. It shows the right order, so even an unfinished task teaches something, and you don’t get embarrassed in front of the queue.
Make the wheel feel right
Tasks sit on a wheel of cards. The idea came from Yandex Cloud’s designer and our art director. My part was the feel. On a 55-inch screen a wheel easily feels too light or too heavy, and I tuned it until it felt right. It sweeps through all the cards once, so you see how many there are, and a flick snaps to the nearest card.
Turn every result into a lead
Points are the reason to finish. In the short mode the right bundle earns them, and the screen sends you to the booth staff to trade them for merch.
“Build it yourself” gives no points, so its result offers the short mode with one button.
Every result also has a QR code: a request form for materials or a consultation.
Hand over code, not mockups
The plan was the usual one: I design, developers build. Then our art director asked why I didn’t build it myself. I said yes right away, even with a week and a half for everything.
So Yandex Cloud reviewed a live game instead of pictures, and approved the design, the flow and the motion right on the screen. The contractor’s engineers took my code as the base for production. On a tight deadline, checking the build against the design took almost no time: the design was already code.
Where it landed
Booth
The game ran at the Yandex Cloud booth at Yandex Scale 2026.
Code
Production shipped on my code, with minor changes.