Case Study
LiveOps Design
Rethinking how Candy Crush delivers content to players and building a design system that scales.
Rethinking how Candy Crush delivers content to players and building a design system that scales.
An image is worth a thousand words. I hope it's true.
In case it isn't—and you rather have a thousand words instead—then get comfy on your chair, take a sip of water (it has been quite some time since you had some), and keep scrolling.
Notice that previously the cards were very different from each other. It turns out that it was a manifestation of an underlying issue: teams were fighting for users' attention.
A product is not only built of users' needs, but the business has needs of its own. One of the basics is to “talk” to users through the visual interface, and often companies want to say many things.
Candy Crush has a wide range of extra features (so-called “events”) parallel to the main progression. New events come and go all the time, and teams didn't have an orderly way to communicate with users. This situation led to each team having to find their own ways around it.
With every team simultaneously using all sorts of visual tricks to get players' attention, the product became noisy, inconsistent and confusing. The main problem to be solved in this project was to offer a well-structured system for teams to communicate with users and deliver content.
The organization was growing fast, and there were plenty of opportunities to eliminate repetitive work when creating a new event for developers and artists.
Users don't read pages, they scan. We continuously saw in usability tests that users had a hard time getting information at a glance. Ultimately they would feel overwhelmed and ignore the page altogether.
I started with the main piece of this puzzle - the card.
It was crucial to explore its information architecture to uncover communication gaps and basic needs, being considerate to what would make the most sense to tell users at each stage of their journey in the product. Below you can see some examples of all the designs I went through during that early phase.
I was fortunate to work with amazing UX designers and researchers to get things in front of our users as soon as possible. I helped creating different interface directions to address our problem and several interactive prototypes to investigate our assumptions and refine our designs utilizing a specific research method for each test. It didn't take long until patterns started to emerge.
It helped us find out the right amount of information to show, which card design was the best, and how the page navigation should be.
A concept that I brought to our prototypes, and thought testing turned out to be very relevant, was giving the cards different states.
This system gave players a greater sense of structure, progress, and overview.
These are some of the templates I've created for each state.
Once all cards had a similar structure, the overall page became very predictable, organized, homogenous, and—well—boring. But this is good too! When everything screams, nothing gets heard. By toning everything down, we create the opportunity to design ways for things to intentionaly stand out.
The first element in this direction was the golden card. It tells players that they can claim a reward. It's what players care about the most, so we made it very easy for them to spot it.
We also created a spotlight placement at the top, dedicated to a unique card, double in size and the only one that allows animation and background image. This ability to promote one feature brought a lot of traction to the one taking that place. But there's a catch—only one at a time. That forced the business to think harder and better define priorities.
These are examples of the fantastic work that production teams have done applying the design system to their features.
Feature teams couldn't stop production to implement the new format. So we had to implement everything by ourselves. It turned out to be the perfect opportunity to test our systems, polish the process, and optimize on the go.
In this phase I implemented the designs directly into our game engine, and worked with developers through all the complexities of bringing the project into our working product.
After this, our system was working like a clock. We gained a lot of hands-on experience to share with the rest of the organization and a solid foundation for the product.
Changing the rails ahead while the train is moving full speed is challenging, and the design craft has a critical role in helping with internal communication.
I often took the lead as the spokesperson for the team to present our progress in the all-hands meetings, which is an opportunity to share the reasoning behind design decisions, ultimately helping to elevate the design maturity in the organization.
That experience helped me create the design documentation with a detailed implementation guide for art and design.
None of this would be possible without a fantastic team passionate about giving a great game to our players.
This case study focuses on what I've done, but that's only one part of the story. Many talented people had important roles throughout the entire project.
I hope you had an enjoyable reading, and if you still have a little bit of time, I'd like to invite you to visit some other projects, or even my Playground section where you can mindlessly scroll through colorful pictures :D
Thanks!
