Strategy and Design for Consumer Product Site

Background

American Girl products are known for their premium experience that keeps their customers (girls and moms) coming back to buy American Girl products. 1st January of every year American Girl launches a ‘Girl of the year’ through their product site.

This product site revolved around a key product launch that was expected to earn 1/4th of the American Girls annual revenues in 2012.

Role

As an engagement lead the creative pitch to American Girl against four top creative agencies in the US and won the business, conducted user and market research, built a conceptual framework and defined initial design direction, closely collaborated with American Girl stakeholders throughout the engagement, outlined the product roadmap, directed design and engineering teams, participated in product testing. I led a 28 member cross-functional product team to deliver the project in 5.5 months, from an idea to implementation.

Product Concept

Girl of the year (GOTY) demonstrates the power of believing in yourself and your potential by focusing on your strengths rather than your weaknesses. The message carried throughout her stories is that you don’t have to excel at everything that confidence lies in finding the right “balance” between strengths and weaknesses and in using what you know to help master what you don’t know. GOTY’s stories also encourage girls to respect and appreciate differences among people and to realize that every girl has the power to help others believe in themselves, too.

Girl of the year 2012 was McKenna who has always excelled at school and in gymnastics, but now that she’s entering fourth grade, school feels suddenly hard to her. The goal of this microsite was to drive girl engagement in GOTY 2012 character and her stories through repeatable and value-added online activities and raise awareness of the 2012 GOTY messaging statement: A determined girl who uses her strengths to turn challenges into triumphs.

The overall experience of this site was focused on four parts.
1. User Registration
2. Take the challenge (gamification of online and offline activities for the user based on their strengths and weakness)
3. Build your routine – user would create different gymnastics routine based on the trophies they earn from the online and offline activities.
4. Share your challenge achievements with your parents and friends via e-card.

The slideshow below displays the end to end the flow of microsite designed focusing on four-part of the user experience mentioned above.