Company: Disney XD, Burbank, California, United States
Project: Prank-a-tron 5000 app game
Expertise: Branding, Product Design, UX Design, UI Design, Motion Design, Icon Design
Challenge
Disney wanted to broaden their XD Watch Now audience in the US market. The goal was to engage 8- to 12-year olds to find out more about popular TV shows in the way most familiar to them - by playing on a mobile app.
Action
Given the main goal of engaging kids, we decided to design a soundboard-like feature. Catchy songs, sounds, and lines from TV shows provided a perfect foundation for a mobile soundboard app.
This approach required a lot of planning and precisely organized UX flows.
To make it more fun, the idea was to wrap it around pranks. That’s how Prank-A-Tron 5000 was born. The logo and the overall UI were created to support the ‘pranky’ look and feel, and to be on brand as well.
The challenge was to come up with the right selection of pranks – to match kids’ expectations, but also to stay within the frame of Disney’s family-friendly image.
Literally translating soundboard features to the mobile environment seemed like missing an opportunity at creating something more unique. We wanted to allow for more user involvement and creativity and let kids customize sounds for their pranks.
That’s why Prank-A-Tron 5000 allows users to download Disney’s sounds, create and add their own, set up a mix (“sound stack”), and then apply the sounds to the selected mode (prank).
The modes are tailored to match real-life situations: For example, the “covert” mode mimics a turned-off phone. If the phone is only slightly moved, however, it plays the selected sound – creating a startling effect.
Impact
Just a month after its launch, Prank-A-Tron was the number one game in the Disney XD Watch Now app. It received 175,000 game starts on iOS, which was 55% more than the next highest-placed game.
Credits: Visible Media
"Jovan is an exceptional leader who inspires, engages, and motivates his team to do and be better. No matter the work at hand, Jovan made it easy for us all to find joy in even the most stressful situations, by creating a positive and encouraging environment for us to learn new things and take something out of it each time. "
— Joyce Assaf, Junior Designer, Visible Media