First Time User Experience: Boosters
First Time User Experience: Boosters
First Time User Experience — Boosters
Reinventing the FTUE as a zero barrier onboarding experience designed for immediate engagement and long-term retention.
Reinventing the FTUE as a zero barrier onboarding experience designed for immediate engagement and long-term retention.
Reinventing the FTUE as a zero barrier onboarding experience designed for immediate engagement and long-term retention.
ROLE
UX Designer
PLATFORM
iOS/Android
TIMELINE
H1 2025
TEAM
PM, Dev,
Data, Art
01
Overview
In H1 2025, I established company-wide FTUE (First Time User Experience) design principles and a unified player experience vision to guide all onboarding initiatives. Within this framework, I led the redesign of booster onboarding — replacing legacy hard-coded pop-ups with an immersive, contextual introduction that teaches boosters in the moment of need.
By demonstrating usage in relevant gameplay situations, players could immediately understand, trust, and apply boosters, driving significant increases in usage, purchase conversion, and revenue.
02
FTUE Strategic Vision
Before tackling specific problems, I developed a comprehensive player experience vision that was implemented organization-wide, establishing the design philosophy and strategic approach that now guides all FTUE development across Candy Crush.
Player Experience Vision
“Create invisible learning experiences that guide players to mastery while making them feel clever, not taught”
Strategic Foundation
MISSION
Get more players to experience Candy's strategic depth through superior FTUE that drives retention and builds daily habits.
VISION
Cut through the noise—let players discover Candy's depth through invisible learning that makes them feel clever, not taught.
APPROACH
Transform onboarding into gameplay-integrated tutorials that are meaningful and progressively discovered through natural gameplay.
FTUE & Onboarding Pillars
6 Core Design Principles
Showcase Candy's best. Earlier.
Build a routine, fast.
Lightweight, invisible
& effortless.Contextual & Relevant
Adaptive & Modular
Brand & Narrative
AlignmentPlayer Experience Vision
“Create invisible learning experiences that guide players to mastery while making them feel clever, not taught”
Strategic Foundation
MISSION
Get more players to experience Candy's strategic depth through superior FTUE that drives retention and builds daily habits.
VISION
Cut through the noise—let players discover Candy's depth through invisible learning that makes them feel clever, not taught.
APPROACH
Transform onboarding into gameplay-integrated tutorials that are meaningful and progressively discovered through natural gameplay.
FTUE & Onboarding Pillars
6 Core Design Principles
Showcase Candy's best. Earlier.
Build a routine, fast.
Lightweight, invisible
& effortless.Contextual & Relevant
Adaptive & Modular
Brand & Narrative
AlignmentPlayer Experience Vision
“Create invisible learning experiences that guide players to mastery while making them feel clever, not taught”
Strategic Foundation
MISSION
Get more players to experience Candy's strategic depth through superior FTUE that drives retention and builds daily habits.
VISION
Cut through the noise—let players discover Candy's depth through invisible learning that makes them feel clever, not taught.
APPROACH
Transform onboarding into gameplay-integrated tutorials that are meaningful and progressively discovered through natural gameplay.
FTUE & Onboarding Pillars
6 Core Design Principles
Showcase Candy's best. Earlier.
Build a routine, fast.
Lightweight, invisible
& effortless.Contextual & Relevant
Adaptive & Modular
Brand & Narrative
AlignmentPlayer Experience Vision
“Create invisible learning experiences that guide players to mastery while making them feel clever, not taught”
Strategic Foundation
MISSION
Get more players to experience Candy's strategic depth through superior FTUE that drives retention and builds daily habits.
VISION
Cut through the noise—let players discover Candy's depth through invisible learning that makes them feel clever, not taught.
APPROACH
Transform onboarding into gameplay-integrated tutorials that are meaningful and progressively discovered through natural gameplay.
FTUE & Onboarding Pillars
6 Core Design Principles
Showcase Candy's best. Earlier.
Build a routine, fast.
Lightweight, invisible
& effortless.Contextual & Relevant
Adaptive & Modular
Brand & Narrative
Alignment
This project specifically focuses on the onboarding experience of Boosters in Candy Crush Saga
03
Booster Context
Boosters are power-ups accessed from the booster bar, designed to help players clear challenging levels. They can be earned, purchased, or rewarded through gameplay.
Example
Party Booster
Party Booster clears the entire top layer of the gameboard!
Booster Bar
Shows the boosters a player owns, with quantities displayed for each. This is the primary point of access during gameplay — and the place players expect to find a newly unlocked booster after a tutorial.
05
Research & UX Audit
A systematic product quality review by PMs and Researchers identified the most pervasive FTUE issues, which I translated into actionable design improvements backed by qualitative and quantitative insights.
50+
Unique Problems
7
Critical Priority
20
Internal Evaluators
1000
Users
PROBLEM
PRIORITY
Lack of Booster Explanation
Unrefined Booster System introduction
Blank events tab
Lack of explanation about golden crown
Unclear / unintuitive wording
Lack of Economy System Introduction
Hints lack educational input
PROBLEMS WITH BOOSTERS FTUE
5 DEADLY BOOSTER PROBLEMS
Based on the Product Quality Review of Candy Crush Saga’s FTUE, I identified and prioritized four foundational onboarding issues, drawing on user research and direct feedback from first-time players.
PROBLEM 1
Players unlock boosters without understanding how to use them, leading to low adoption and missed monetization opportunities.
PROBLEM 2
Poor context & flow structure weakens onboarding effectiveness
The flow presents score summary with animated stars, but gets disrupted mid-sequence by a booster introduction popup, breaking continuity before resuming the summary. This jarring interruption fragments the user's mental model during a critical learning moment, reducing comprehension and undermining the tutorial's effectiveness.
PROBLEM 3
Popup-heavy onboarding causes fatigue and reduces effectiveness
The booster tutorial adds to an already crowded popup ecosystem filled with promos, bonuses, and event alerts. This overload creates popup fatigue, causing players to skip tutorials and miss key instructions, reducing learning and breaking gameplay flow at critical moments.
PROBLEM 4
Tutorials are hard coded , not dynamic or adjustable.
2012
When Candy Crush Saga Launched
2025
Still using the same onboarding popup and flow
PROBLEM 4
Slow booster rollout drivers users to competitors
Candy Crush waits until Level 90+ to unlock some boosters, while rivals showcase them within the first 20 levels. This delay makes early play feel repetitive and less rewarding, driving players to faster-paced competitors.
UFO
The awesome UFO booster that blasts explosive candies across the board only unlocks at level 72!
06
Problem–Solution Framework
I treated the five most critical FTUE issues as design constraints, ensuring every solution directly addressed a friction point in the player journey. This framework created an onboarding experience that is contextual, dynamic, scalable, and invisible to the player.
Mapping Problem to Solution
Poor Booster Context
Contextualized and immediately usable
Flawed Popup format
Dynamic overlay above gameplay
Hard Coded
Modular, scalable, and easily adjustable system
Late Introduction
Front-loaded, lifecycle-aware, progressive disclosure
Look & Feel Principles
Consistent with brand
Lightweight & snappy
Invisible onboarding
By pairing each pain point with a clear, flexible solution — and applying consistent design principles — we have a clear framework for approaching all FTUE & onboarding experiences in the future.
06
Initial Concepts
Key Design Changes
1
Improving contextual understanding by Moving the Booster ahead of the game round for immediate usage.
2
Instructional copywriting that succinctly explains the booster mechanic
3
Booster seeding animation to indicate how many boosters enter the player's inventory
4
Boosters animate into the booster bar to to draw a causal connection to the booster bar UI.
More Celebratory & Narrative Driven
Candy Crush Saga's character mascots are under-utilized. We explored inserting the characters to celebrate the unlock moment, without taking away focus from the booster.
06
In-Game Booster Outcomes
Implementing the new FTUE
Before
Seeded after a game round, with a subpar tutorial.
After
Seeded right before a game round starts, immediately usable.
Removing the Hard Code Barrier
Decoupled FTUE from fixed level triggers, replacing the hard-coded popup with a configurable system. This allows the team to easily shift onboarding to different levels or reorder the sequence to improve player experience without additional development effort.
Old Progression had Boosters locked to their level ordinals
New Progression front-loads the booster experience to prevent a content desert. it is also fully operable
Future Slices
Improved UI & Art
This flexible framework enables future visual improvements for FTUE and onboarding of any game elements. By removing hard-coded barriers, the team now has full control over UI updates and iterations
Load Screen Reinforcement Learning
In a concurrent project I'm working on that compliments the new booster tutorial sequences, I designed load screen micro-tutorials that flash core gameplay concepts during transitions, turning dead time into passive learning moments that reinforce mechanics without interrupting play.
06
Pre-game Boosters Outcome
Before
Before — Popup Format
The old popup format did not differentiate pre-game boosters from in-game ones, and were not introduced in the right context where players can use them.
After — Auto-selection & Explicit Seeding
Auto Selected Pre-game boosters, teach the players that they can equip certain boosters right before the game round.
Success Metrics & Key Learnings
This project reinforced the importance of designing for immediate value discovery rather than comprehensive feature education. By focusing on the moment players first experience meaningful progress with boosters, we fundamentally shifted our approach to onboarding. The key insight: players don't need to understand everything upfront — they need to experience joy quickly and build confidence through progressive success. Our streamlined tutorial prioritized showing value over infantilizing users with excessive explanation, showing that effective onboarding with progressive disclosure is stronger when we focus on the player experience and early game perceptions, rather than information transfer by brute force."
Retention D30
3%
Gross Bookings
0.5%
Booster Usage
10%
Booster Purchases
8%
03
Booster Context
Boosters are power-ups accessed from the booster bar, designed to help players clear challenging levels. They can be earned, purchased, or rewarded through gameplay.
Example
Party Booster
Party Booster clears the entire top layer of the gameboard!
Booster Bar
Shows the boosters a player owns, with quantities displayed for each. This is the primary point of access during gameplay — and the place players expect to find a newly unlocked booster after a tutorial.
01
Overview
In H1 2025, I established company-wide FTUE (First Time User Experience) design principles and a unified player experience vision to guide all onboarding initiatives. Within this framework, I led the redesign of booster onboarding — replacing legacy hard-coded pop-ups with an immersive, contextual introduction that teaches boosters in the moment of need.
By demonstrating usage in relevant gameplay situations, players could immediately understand, trust, and apply boosters, driving significant increases in usage, purchase conversion, and revenue.
02
FTUE Strategic Vision
Before tackling specific problems, I developed a comprehensive player experience vision that was implemented organization-wide, establishing the design philosophy and strategic approach that now guides all FTUE development across Candy Crush.
Player Experience Vision
“Create invisible learning experiences that guide players to mastery while making them feel clever, not taught”
Strategic Foundation
MISSION
Get more players to experience Candy's strategic depth through superior FTUE that drives retention and builds daily habits.
VISION
Cut through the noise—let players discover Candy's depth through invisible learning that makes them feel clever, not taught.
APPROACH
Transform onboarding into gameplay-integrated tutorials that are meaningful and progressively discovered through natural gameplay.
FTUE & Onboarding Pillars
6 Core Design Principles
Showcase Candy's best. Earlier.
Build a routine, fast.
Lightweight, invisible
& effortless.Contextual & Relevant
Adaptive & Modular
Brand & Narrative
AlignmentPlayer Experience Vision
“Create invisible learning experiences that guide players to mastery while making them feel clever, not taught”
Strategic Foundation
MISSION
Get more players to experience Candy's strategic depth through superior FTUE that drives retention and builds daily habits.
VISION
Cut through the noise—let players discover Candy's depth through invisible learning that makes them feel clever, not taught.
APPROACH
Transform onboarding into gameplay-integrated tutorials that are meaningful and progressively discovered through natural gameplay.
FTUE & Onboarding Pillars
6 Core Design Principles
Showcase Candy's best. Earlier.
Build a routine, fast.
Lightweight, invisible
& effortless.Contextual & Relevant
Adaptive & Modular
Brand & Narrative
AlignmentPlayer Experience Vision
“Create invisible learning experiences that guide players to mastery while making them feel clever, not taught”
Strategic Foundation
MISSION
Get more players to experience Candy's strategic depth through superior FTUE that drives retention and builds daily habits.
VISION
Cut through the noise—let players discover Candy's depth through invisible learning that makes them feel clever, not taught.
APPROACH
Transform onboarding into gameplay-integrated tutorials that are meaningful and progressively discovered through natural gameplay.
FTUE & Onboarding Pillars
6 Core Design Principles
Showcase Candy's best. Earlier.
Build a routine, fast.
Lightweight, invisible
& effortless.Contextual & Relevant
Adaptive & Modular
Brand & Narrative
AlignmentPlayer Experience Vision
“Create invisible learning experiences that guide players to mastery while making them feel clever, not taught”
Strategic Foundation
MISSION
Get more players to experience Candy's strategic depth through superior FTUE that drives retention and builds daily habits.
VISION
Cut through the noise—let players discover Candy's depth through invisible learning that makes them feel clever, not taught.
APPROACH
Transform onboarding into gameplay-integrated tutorials that are meaningful and progressively discovered through natural gameplay.
FTUE & Onboarding Pillars
6 Core Design Principles
Showcase Candy's best. Earlier.
Build a routine, fast.
Lightweight, invisible
& effortless.Contextual & Relevant
Adaptive & Modular
Brand & Narrative
Alignment
This project specifically focuses on the onboarding experience of Boosters in Candy Crush Saga
03
Booster Context
Boosters are power-ups accessed from the booster bar, designed to help players clear challenging levels. They can be earned, purchased, or rewarded through gameplay.
Example
Party Booster
Party Booster clears the entire top layer of the gameboard!
Booster Bar
Shows the boosters a player owns, with quantities displayed for each. This is the primary point of access during gameplay — and the place players expect to find a newly unlocked booster after a tutorial.
05
Research & UX Audit
A systematic product quality review by PMs and Researchers identified the most pervasive FTUE issues, which I translated into actionable design improvements backed by qualitative and quantitative insights.
50+
Unique Problems
7
Critical Priority
20
Internal Evaluators
1000
Users
PROBLEM
PRIORITY
Lack of Booster Explanation
Unrefined Booster System introduction
Blank events tab
Lack of explanation about golden crown
Unclear / unintuitive wording
Lack of Economy System Introduction
Hints lack educational input
PROBLEMS WITH BOOSTERS FTUE
Based on the Product Quality Review of Candy Crush Saga’s FTUE, I identified and prioritized four foundational onboarding issues, drawing on user research and direct feedback from first-time players.
PROBLEM 1
Players unlock boosters without understanding how to use them, leading to low adoption and missed monetization opportunities.
PROBLEM 2
Poor context & flow structure weakens onboarding effectiveness
The flow presents score summary with animated stars, but gets disrupted mid-sequence by a booster introduction popup, breaking continuity before resuming the summary. This jarring interruption fragments the user's mental model during a critical learning moment, reducing comprehension and undermining the tutorial's effectiveness.
PROBLEM 3
Popup-heavy onboarding causes fatigue and reduces effectiveness
The booster tutorial adds to an already crowded popup ecosystem filled with promos, bonuses, and event alerts. This overload creates popup fatigue, causing players to skip tutorials and miss key instructions, reducing learning and breaking gameplay flow at critical moments.
PROBLEM 4
Tutorials are hard coded , not dynamic or adjustable.
2012
When Candy Crush Saga Launched
2025
Still using the same onboarding popup and flow
PROBLEM 4
Slow booster rollout drivers users to competitors
Candy Crush waits until Level 90+ to unlock some boosters, while rivals showcase them within the first 20 levels. This delay makes early play feel repetitive and less rewarding, driving players to faster-paced competitors.
UFO
The awesome UFO booster that blasts explosive candies across the board only unlocks at level 72!
06
Problem–Solution Framework
I treated the five most critical FTUE issues as design constraints, ensuring every solution directly addressed a friction point in the player journey. This framework created an onboarding experience that is contextual, dynamic, scalable, and invisible to the player.
Mapping Problem to Solution
Poor Booster Context
Contextualized and immediately usable
Flawed Popup format
Dynamic overlay above gameplay
Hard Coded
Modular, scalable, and easily adjustable system
Late Introduction
Front-loaded, lifecycle-aware, progressive disclosure
Look & Feel Principles
Consistent with brand
Lightweight & snappy
Invisible onboarding
By pairing each pain point with a clear, flexible solution — and applying consistent design principles — we have a clear framework for approaching all FTUE & onboarding experiences in the future.
06
Initial Concepts
Key Design Changes
1
Improving contextual understanding by Moving the Booster ahead of the game round for immediate usage.
2
Instructional copywriting that succinctly explains the booster mechanic
3
Booster seeding animation to indicate how many boosters enter the player's inventory
4
Boosters animate into the booster bar to to draw a causal connection to the booster bar UI.
More Celebratory & Narrative Driven
Candy Crush Saga's character mascots are under-utilized. We explored inserting the characters to celebrate the unlock moment, without taking away focus from the booster.
06
In-Game Booster Outcomes
Implementing the new FTUE
Before
Seeded after a game round, with a subpar tutorial.
After
Seeded right before a game round starts, immediately usable.
Removing the Hard Code Barrier
Decoupled FTUE from fixed level triggers, replacing the hard-coded popup with a configurable system. This allows the team to easily shift onboarding to different levels or reorder the sequence to improve player experience without additional development effort.
Old Progression had Boosters locked to their level ordinals
New Progression front-loads the booster experience to prevent a content desert. it is also fully operable
Future Slices
Improved UI & Art
This flexible framework enables future visual improvements for FTUE and onboarding of any game elements. By removing hard-coded barriers, the team now has full control over UI updates and iterations
Load Screen Reinforcement Learning
In a concurrent project I'm working on that compliments the new booster tutorial sequences, I designed load screen micro-tutorials that flash core gameplay concepts during transitions, turning dead time into passive learning moments that reinforce mechanics without interrupting play.
06
Pre-game Boosters Outcome
Before
Before — Popup Format
The old popup format did not differentiate pre-game boosters from in-game ones, and were not introduced in the right context where players can use them.
After — Auto-selection & Explicit Seeding
Auto Selected Pre-game boosters, teach the players that they can equip certain boosters right before the game round.
Success Metrics & Key Learnings
This project reinforced the importance of designing for immediate value discovery rather than comprehensive feature education. By focusing on the moment players first experience meaningful progress with boosters, we fundamentally shifted our approach to onboarding. The key insight: players don't need to understand everything upfront — they need to experience joy quickly and build confidence through progressive success. Our streamlined tutorial prioritized showing value over infantilizing users with excessive explanation, showing that effective onboarding with progressive disclosure is stronger when we focus on the player experience and early game perceptions, rather than information transfer by brute force."
Retention D30
3%
Gross Bookings
0.5%
Booster Usage
10%
Booster Purchases
8%
03
Booster Context
Boosters are power-ups accessed from the booster bar, designed to help players clear challenging levels. They can be earned, purchased, or rewarded through gameplay.
Example
Party Booster
Party Booster clears the entire top layer of the gameboard!
Booster Bar
Shows the boosters a player owns, with quantities displayed for each. This is the primary point of access during gameplay — and the place players expect to find a newly unlocked booster after a tutorial.