The Barbie DreamFloor

Client: THAT, Mattel, in collaboration with Buzzfeed and EKO

Role: Lead User Experience Designer

Technology: Balsamiq, Omnigraffle, Adobe Creative Suite 

Awards: “Best Interactive Content Series” – Digiday, “Silver Telly, Branded Content Craft-Interactive Video” Telly Awards, and “Silver Telly, Branded Content General-Children” – Telly Awards

Project Description

Forget boring toy catalogs – the Barbie DreamFloor introduces a whole new way for kids to explore toys through elaborate storytelling and interactive video.

The experience features live-action footage of hundreds of Mattel toys and places them into an imaginative, interactive online story where kids have full narrative control (think Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, with a wider range of interactive possibilities). 

Barbie DreamFloor reimagines the future of entertainment and advertisement.

With 33 possible narrative paths, dozens of easter egg surprises, and an e-commerce experience for parents to boot, I had the pleasure of leading the full-stack design efforts for this project in collaboration with some of the top creative partners around.

Role

Crafting an interactive narrative of this scale isn’t easy. The interdisciplinary skills needed for this experience were immense.

From the initial creative concept, to working directly with our talented writers to shape the narrative with 100+ pages of interactive scripts, to collaborating with art directors, cinematographers, set designers and producers on set, to leading animators, visual designers, editors, and developers during post-production, this project allowed me to take narrative and experience design to a whole new level. 

My deliverables included:

  • Project scope and requirements
  • Design management and strategic planning
  • Concept development
  • Complex user flows
  • Experience map diagrams
  • Designing end-to-end wireframes
  • Technical specifications
  • Interactive prototypes
  • Animation samples
  • Mediation across content, design, production, development, and stakeholders

The Barbie DreamFloor is part of the larger “KidHQ” experience for Walmart/Mattel/Buzzfeed.   

Sample Documentation

 

Full Experience Map:

 

Sample user flows: