Virtual Product Design at Crayola
Designing Crayola’s library of apps and interactive experiences.
Project Overview:
For roughly two and a half years, I was one of the very first “virtual” product designers at Crayola responsible for the ongoing design, development, research, and testing of their virtual product initiative.
A very new role for the company, the distinction of “virtual” product design is meant to denote a forward facing shift in the types of products and experiences offered by one of the most beloved brands in the world as it looks toward the future and staying relevant with a rapidly changing modern landscape full of proliferated technology and smart devices.
During my tenure I helped launch 6 unique apps, and 8 different app-enabled products on store shelves nationwide. More importantly, I was responsible for answering the question: “What does a Crayola app actually do?”
Client:
Crayola
My Role:
Virtual Product Designer
Timeline:
2015 – 2018
Interactive Design:
Interactive design at the intersection of aspirational role play & creativity.
What does an app at Crayola look like, anyway? As a part of the design team responsible for answering that question, we settled on three main pillars to hold up our interactive experiences:
Aspirational play: the app experience should proliferate tools and opportunities for role play they don’t currently have access to, using a mix of their own creativity and the powerful technology in their hands.
Collaborative interaction: while each product is designed around a primary user, we intentionally designed them in a way which would promote social and collaborative experiences between any number of friends and family with access to the same device.
Ease of use: regardless of user age, device, or level of expertise, a user should be able to enter the app and have a successful creative experience.
“Fashion Superstar,” which released in 2017, represents the culmination of our team’s efforts to serve up Crayola’s brand of creative play as an aspirational, interactive experience.
Above is one of the demo stations set up at NYC’s Toy Fair, where we had to think through how we would share out the Easy Animation Studio experience to the press & media for the very first time.
Business & Product Design:
Involvement in each and every area of the business, each and every step of the project.
Given the size and “start-up” mentality of the virtual product design team, I wound up wearing a number of different hats as I worked just about every area of the business.
Running demos at conferences: from the annual ToyFair in NYC to smaller industry events, it fell on my team to showcase our new types of experiences to the press and wider world.
Facilitating user testing sessions: while Crayola already had traditional product and focus testing figured out, testing our app-enabled experiences required us to build out a new set of user testing procedure for collecting both useful and usable data.
Managing external development & art teams: internally we were responsible for the UI, UX, and interaction points, but development and art design were handled by external teams we had to manage remotely via regular meetings and updates.
In Conclusion:
Direct, hands-on experience with just about every area of product design & development.
Working at Crayola gave me the rare opportunity to not just own several highly visible products for one of the most beloved and recognizable brands in the world, but also gave me direct, hands-on experience working closely with just about every area of the business.
This not only gave me valuable experience which would transfer nicely into working within the broader tech landscape, but shaped my understanding of how the different areas of a business, as well as the different roles on a team, come together to build and support products and interactive experiences.