Disney SpellStruck reimagines the traditional word puzzle as a vibrant adventure through the Disney universe, where players engage with beloved characters and delightful surprises. Fully compliant to Apple’s HIG, the game was crafted to provide an inclusive, engaging experience for players of all ages. The result was a fun and scalable UX/UI design, that seamlessly balanced Disney’s iconic characters with cross-platform usability, culminating in a global hit that topped charts.

The Origin Story

Disney Spellstruck began as an innovative word puzzle game and evolved into a Disney-branded title through partnerships with Apple Arcade and Disney. Developed by Artist Arcade in collaboration with David Bettner (creator of Words with Friends), the game reimagined wordplay with a magical, story-driven experience.

As the lead UX designer, I was responsible for shaping the player experience, ensuring the game was engaging, intuitive, and visually cohesive. The challenge was to blend deep, rewarding gameplay with Disney’s high standards for usability and brand storytelling—all while making it accessible to casual players and puzzle enthusiasts alike.

My team's work comprised of several aspects:

• Creating User Flows: understanding the rhythm of the game, as well as the order of screens, messages were crucial to encourage gameplay, make things intuitive and keep players coming back

• Planning & designing screens and overlays: the layout of areas such as the home screen, as well as in-game overlays, sidebars, popups and messaging

• Setting Controls: developing a control system that scaled to all Apple Arcade supported devices, as well as input devices

• Gameplay elements: the core elements used to play the game, as well as the messaging (verbal & non-verbal) provided by those elements, for example, whether a move is allowed or not, correct or not, or the impact of events like power-ups.

As lead UX, I also created a process and workflow for the UX team that accounted for exploration/trial and error, as well as production and handoff standards.

The Maps

The Challenge

1. 1. Ensuring players understand the relationships between maps (the "world").

2. 2. Providing clarity on the number of levels within a single map.

3. 3. Making progress visibility clear for seamless navigation.

4. 4. Navigating across devices without difficulty, ensuring accessibility.

How we did it

• • Rich graphics and interactive elements required extensive testing and iteration to ensure functionality.

• • Active state management, transitions between maps, and confirmation popups needed refinement through multiple iterations.

• • Button functions for both touch and mouse inputs were continuously discussed and adjusted to enhance usability.

• The final implementation offers a user-friendly interface with straightforward core interactions, ensuring robust accessibility across devices.

The Board

The Tiles

The tile system is the core part of the gameplay. In normal Scrabble, all tiles look about the same. In our game, tiles were all individually designed to represent the characters. The Scrabble board is usually quite simple as well, with only different colors for different point values (double word, triple letter, etc), whereas in our case, we also had powerups and the gamepad cursor.

Things got messy pretty quick, so it was my responsibility to come up with a system. After much iteration, the result was a combination of colors, outlines as well as VFX.

The Characters

We worked closely with Disney to ensure their iconic characters were faithfully represented. I created file and folder structures and patterns that enabled better communication, as well as continuous implementations after I was no longer in the team.

The Results

• Achieved #1 on the App Store for weeks, remaining in the Top 20 for several months.

• • Featured by Apple at WWDC and as part of Disney’s 100th Anniversary.

• • Continue to inspire thriving fan communities, tons of social media posts and YouTube walkthroughs.

• • Much love from players of all ages.

Learnings

Working within a game dev structure means not always having full control of product design. It's important to remain collaborative and contribute your share.

At the same time, lead designers have an opportunity to create the means for better collaboration across disciplines, which always leads to better results. This is a principle I carry out in every project.

Disclaimer: game images and videos © 2023 Disney. © 2023 Disney/Pixar. © 2023 Artist Arcade. The material displayed here is merely for informative purposes.