Transforming Booyah’s UX/UI for the Western Market
Adapting Booyah’s interface and experience to connect with Western and Latin American gamers.
Position
UX/UI Designer
My role
Research, Content and UX/UI Design
Team
Marketing team from Singapore and Product team in Brazil
Booyah's Revamp · 2022
Led the redesign of the Booyah gaming streaming app—a Garena platform popular in Latin America for Free Fire highlights, live streams, and community features—to boost user engagement and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
As a global product, Booyah communicates in a single universal way with all audiences — Latin Americans, Chinese, Indonesians, and others. This showed us that the product had little connection with Western users. The data also confirmed that we couldn’t grow our audience with a platform that wasn’t built for them.
The Singapore‑based marketing and product teams reached out for help to understand what could be done differently to boost engagement. As the only UX/UI designer working on the Western side of the company, I took on the challenge to research, design, and show them what this audience really wanted.
original app
Stage of the project
Products that perform well in Asia often struggle in Western markets, except in a few cases where localization is done properly. To understand this gap, I followed a structured process:
📝 01. Competitive benchmarking — focusing on community, communication, platforms, and social media used in the West.
📊 02. Monetization analysis — how competitors make money in Western markets.
👁️ 03. Heuristic evaluation — Booyah’s app and platform compared with competitors.
🔍 04. User research — defining the profile of our users.
📱 05. Redesign and testing — iterating with user feedback.
🎨 06. UI Kit delivery — establishing a visual system for implementation.
a small part of the research board
Key insights ✨
When comparing Booyah with other successful platforms, we discovered crucial differences:
🌈 They offer diverse content, not focused on just one game.
🇧🇷 Their communication adapts to the target culture: tone, visuals, and messaging shift depending on the audience.
👩🏻💻 They focus on humanizing the brand: engagement comes from authentic interaction, not only rewards or numbers.
🎬 Their platforms act as showcases for streamers and trending games.
🎮 Gamification and rewards are aligned with each audience’s motivation.
a small part of the bench board
Understanding Brazil’s Numbers 👨🏽💻
The Singapore team often asked: “Why are the Brazilian numbers so low?”Brazil has more than 200 million inhabitants, and in recent years over 75–85% of the population has had access to the internet, which means more than 160 million people online. Among them, around 70 million play Free Fire daily in Brazil, making the country one of the game’s strongest markets worldwide.
If the main game reaches this massive and highly connected audience because it runs well on simple devices, the platform that supports this ecosystem needs to be just as lightweight and accessible. Otherwise, Booyah creates a barrier where Free Fire removes one.
Our users need clear communication, an accessible platform, and a feeling of inclusion. That’s what our redesign aimed to deliver.
some studies
Redesign Strategy ✨
When comparing Booyah with other successful platforms, we discovered crucial differences:
📱 Mobile‑first and WCAG‑compliant
👩🎨 Brand modernization, define and apply a consistent identity across redesigns.
🏡 A new homepage, a trustworthy and dynamic showcase.
😌 Simplified navigation, fewer steps and easier configuration.
👥 Community features, establish special memberships and affordable subscriptions, inspired by Twitch.
🚪Flexible login options, removing the restriction of login only through a Garena Free Fire account.
🎨 Delivery of a scalable UI Kit, to support the Singapore development team.
Designing for impact
From 4.3 to 8.6, the numbers
8.6 nps
Together with the recruitment team, we invited 100 players to test the new platform. The outcome was excellent: an NPS of 8.6, compared to 4.3 from the previous version tested five months earlier.
Scaling the impact,next steps
1️⃣ User research and testing in other Latin American countries with regional teams.
2️⃣ Finalize full redesign with country-specific adaptations.
3️⃣ Support implementation with the China development team.
