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American Girl
I worked closely with the American Girl and Mattel teams to explore American Girl’s connected future. My team defined user-centered future experiences to build life-long relationships with children and the people who join them on their journey in growing up. We sought to celebrate the story of girlhood—yesterday and today—through immersive storytelling and a restored connection between products, services, and experiences.
Skills
Design leadership, product strategy, user research, interaction design, visual design, packaging,
Deliverables
Digital & physical prototypes, synthesized user research insights, product roadmap, microsite
My Role
I joined the program mid-way through, trading off with the foundational research team. I led a small multidisciplinary team of designers to translate the initial research insights into product concepts in collaboration with the client. After defining concepts, I led parallel paths of work to run concept evaluation research across two geographies while pushing forward on building a product roadmap. I collaborated closely with the team’s creative director and business design lead to make sure perspectives from client stakeholders were integrated into the customer-centric vision. Ultimately, I was responsible for producing and delivering the final assets to the client.
Problems to solve
It’s no secret that the toy industry is struggling. American Girl, an iconic 90’s brand centered around telling stories about girls throughout history, has had a hard time competing for digital age toys.
American Girl partnered with Fjord to uncover innovative ways to rethink their products and the ways their customers engage with the brand.
Leveraging foundational research
Before I joined, the research team at Fjord interviewed 14 families from major metropolitan, suburban, and rural areas in Illinois, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Participants had a range of sentiment towards American Girl, including families that actively engage with the brand, families that aspire to, and families who no longer wish to. I leveraged the research insights to synthesize themes and generate concepts.
We set out to create a customer-centric connected future.
The success of this work hinged on partnering and collaborating with the true experts - American Girl stakeholders and families. Our future concepts centered around two key areas:
Growing up with American Girl
The connected future of American Girl will foster imagination & growth and connect families through activities, stories, and play.
For children, we will anchor their experience in physical accessories and reading materials. We will empower parents with digital tools to gift, inspire, and contribute to their children’s play.
Immersive Retail
In the connected future, retail will become an immersive experience. American Girl will create a destination for children and their families in spaces that are experiential and innately shareable.
Centered around content, American Girl stores will provide spaces that bring toys and their stories to life, while simultaneously facilitating children to make new stories of their own.
Alignment & generation
Grounded in insights, our team worked with American Girl to generate new ideas grounded in user needs, business, and technology. We led the client through a prioritization exercise based on value to the customer potential for the company.
In two days, the team worked with the American Girl team to design and prototype in design sprints, as well as lay the groundwork for a connected future roadmap.
In parallel, a business designer on our team conducted interviews with over 20 American Girl and Mattel stakeholders to identify business, resourcing, and technology capabilities.
Concept creation & evaluation
Concept development
Next, I collaborated with the industrial, interaction, and visual designers on my team to create illustrated storyboards and low-fidelity prototypes of the connected future prioritized concepts. Nine prioritized concepts shaped a delightful, end-to-end experience that we would bring to kids and parents to evaluate.
Historically, stories and accessories are tied directly to the doll and not related to each other. We conceived of an accessory bundle paired with a story that could be used with any doll, helping children expand and extend their play.
Instead of long chapter books, we invented story starter booklets that included a short graphic novel with an open ending that would inspire the child to use the toys to play out the conclusion.
We created a prototype gift trunk that combined several of the product experiences together. Trough the digital portal, the parent could configure the box to reflect their child’s unique interests.
The trunk would contain a doll, letter from a loved one, and two accessory packs with story starters and parent content.
A booklet to help give parents ideas for how to participate in their child’s play.
Parents could include a personalized note to their child in the gift trunk.
We created a wireframe prototype for the digital portal to describe gift trunk configuration.
In addition to product concepts, we created small dioramas for 8 potential retail experiences to use as a 3D card sort activity in combination with the storyboards in the user studies.
Concept evaluation studies
I led 12 concept evaluation sessions in California and Wisconsin to collect feedback on concepts, as well as gather insights to iterate the core product concepts. In each 90 minute session, we interviewed children and guardians together and separately to understand how the concepts would be perceived. California represented reluctant American Girl customers, while Madison mostly represented core loyal customers.
We ran participants through two illustrative storyboards that put our physical and digital prototypes in the context of American Girl’s service and brand. We invited American Girl team members to join the study sessions to help them gather first-hand experience with their customers.
The power of physical play
In addition to specific feedback on each concept, the most impactful insight was solidifying our hypothesis to focus on physical play with kids. Parents were yearning for ways to give their children toys that are engaging enough to pull them away from screens. American Girl’s detailed toys and rich stories give children that engagement. Our story starter and accessory bundle concepts resonating well because they made those stories more extendable across characters.
From product concept to product roadmap
Concept refinement
Lastly, I led the team to refine the product concepts based on participants’ feedback from the study. We synthesized our findings by prioritizing our concepts into a three-year roadmap based on user desirability and complexity to launch. We defined two’ minimum lovable products’ for 2019 launch and outlined the process, people, and technology required to launch the full vision.
Pulling it together
Instead of leaving the client with a pile of decks, I decided to pull our final deliverables together in an interactive microsite that detailed each product concept, relevant user research insights, product capabilities, and roadmap.
The micro-site gave the American Girl team an easily accessible place to access the product strategy moving forward. We presented the final deliverables to c-level executives at both American Girl and Mattel.
Impact
In less than one year, American Girl independently launched customizable Gift Trunks. The final result, including letter, story starters, box packaging, and online creation flow are almost exact duplicates to the concept prototypes, speaking to the quality and lasting impact of the work.
You can purchase a Gift Trunk now.
