Crayola Color Camera
Designing a creative photo-to-coloring experience for children and caregivers
Crayola Color Camera App Icon
Overview
Crayola Color Camera is a mobile experience that transforms personal photos into printable coloring pages, enabling children to customize, color, and share their own creations.
What began as a concept for a campaign companion evolved into a broader exploration of creativity, ownership, and how children and caregivers engage with digital creative tools.
Through research, prototyping, and usability testing, the project uncovered key behavioral insights that shaped both the product experience and its long-term potential as a reusable platform for future Crayola initiatives, including Colors of the World.
Impact
Business Impact
Contributed to a $5M retail partnership opportunity through prototype validation
Supported Crayola's first internally developed mobile app launch
Established a foundation that could support multiple future campaigns
User Impact
Improved creative workflow clarity
Increased tool discoverability
Reduced friction throughout the creation process
Product Impact
Evolved from a campaign concept into a reusable experience framework
Supported future initiatives without redesigning core interactions
Created a more personal creative experience through user-generated content
My Role
As the lead designer, I was responsible for product discovery, research, concept development, prototyping, usability testing, and experience design from initial framing through launch.
Team: Melanie McCall, Jacob Patten, Crayola Marketing Team, Crayola Innovation Team
Platform: Mobile App (Unity)
The Opportunity
Crayola was exploring ways to extend engagement beyond physical coloring products through digital experiences.
The initial ask was intentionally broad: create a digital companion experience that could support future coloring campaigns.
Before designing features, we needed to better understand the opportunity.
Was this simply a campaign extension, or was there an opportunity to create a more meaningful creative experience that could grow beyond a single initiative?
What We Needed to Learn
Several important questions emerged early:
How can we make coloring feel more personal?
What motivates children to engage with creative experiences over time?
What role do caregivers play in adoption and continued use?
How can a digital experience support future campaigns without becoming more complex?
What would encourage users to return after their first experience?
The answers to these questions would ultimately shape the product direction.
Designing for Children Means Designing for Caregivers Too
One of the most important discoveries was that this experience was never designed for a single audience.
While children were the primary users, caregivers controlled nearly every step leading up to engagement.
Caregivers influenced:
App discovery
Download decisions
Initial setup
First-use experience
Perceived value and trust
Children needed:
Immediate feedback
Playful exploration
High visual clarity
Minimal instruction
Caregivers needed:
Fast comprehension
Clear value
Trust in usability
Low setup friction
Design Implication
Research quickly revealed that adoption and engagement were influenced by different audiences.
Children determined whether the experience was enjoyable.
Caregivers determined whether the experience was discovered, downloaded, trusted, and introduced in the first place.
The experience needed to support both mental models simultaneously without increasing complexity for children.
This became a foundational design principle throughout the project.
Research Approach
Although children were the primary audience, early usability testing focused on caregivers.
Because caregivers controlled adoption, understanding their experience helped identify friction before children ever interacted with the product.
Research Summary
Participants: Approximately 25 adults
Method: Virtual with user using structured questionnaires to while interacting with the product.
Data Collection: Video recordings and observation notes
Focus Areas: Workflow comprehension, tool discoverability, task completion confidence, and end-to-end clarity
Participants completed guided tasks while interacting with the prototype and answered follow-up questions about their experience.
Sessions were video recorded to capture hesitation points, confusion, workflow completion patterns, and overall usability challenges for later review and analysis.
Key Research Principle
An important insight emerged early:
If adults struggled to understand a feature, younger users would likely encounter even greater difficulty.
This became a useful lens for evaluating future design decisions.
Research Findings
Finding #1:
Users struggled to discover sticker editing controls
Participants could successfully place stickers but often had difficulty understanding how to modify them afterward.
Insight
Discoverability mattered more than feature completeness.
Users needed controls to appear when and where they expected them rather than hidden behind additional interface layers.
Finding #2:
Users were unsure when they had completed their artwork
Many participants hesitated at the end of the workflow and expressed uncertainty about whether their task was finished.
Insight
Users needed stronger signals that their creative work was complete.
Without clear completion states, confidence decreased even when the workflow itself was successful.
Finding #3:
Caregiver confidence influenced adoption
Participants who quickly understood the purpose and value of the experience were more likely to complete the workflow and express interest in sharing it with children.
Insight
Creative experiences need to communicate value immediately to the person responsible for introducing them.
Design Implication
Reduce onboarding friction and make the creative outcome clear as early as possible.
How Findings Shaped the Product
Decision #1:
Move from hidden controls to contextual interactions
Sticker editing controls were surfaced when objects were selected rather than hidden in separate menus.
Tradeoff
Increased interface visibility
Slight increase in visual complexity
Outcome
Improved editing confidence and reduced confusion.
Decision #2:
Introduce explicit completion feedback
Clear completion cues and confirmation states were added throughout the final stages of the workflow.
Tradeoff
Added an additional interaction step
Reduced uncertainty and hesitation
Outcome
Increased confidence in saving and completing artwork.
Decision #3:
Prioritize immediate value communication
The experience was designed to quickly communicate what users could create and why it mattered.
Tradeoff
Reduced onboarding depth
Faster understanding and adoption
Outcome
Improved comprehension and reduced first-use friction.
Product Direction
As stakeholder conversations and research findings came together, a larger opportunity emerged.
One insight consistently surfaced throughout the project:
People are naturally more connected to content they create themselves.
Rather than providing pre-made coloring pages, the experience could allow children to transform their own photos into personalized creative outputs.
This approach aligned user needs with business goals.
Children gained a stronger sense of ownership over their creations, while Crayola gained a flexible experience framework that could support future initiatives.
Experience Design Principles
Several principles guided design decisions throughout the project.
Structured Creativity
Too much freedom increased cognitive load.
Too much structure reduced creativity.
The experience was designed to provide guidance while still allowing meaningful self-expression.
Simplest Next Meaningful Action
Every step was evaluated using a simple question:
What is the simplest next meaningful creative action?
This principle helped reduce friction and keep the experience approachable for younger users.
Ownership Over Feature Count
Creative tools were intentionally constrained to:
Stickers
Decorative enhancements
Light customization tools
Save and print functionality
Every feature was evaluated against a simple rule:
Does this increase creative ownership without increasing cognitive load?
If not, it was removed.
Prototype & Validation
Prototypes served as both research tools and communication tools throughout the project.
They allowed the team to validate assumptions, observe usability challenges, gather stakeholder feedback, and align teams around a shared product vision before investing in full development.
Prototype Goals:
Validate concepts internally
Gather stakeholder feedback
Demonstrate the experience to retail partners
Align teams around a shared product vision
Business Outcome
The prototype helped communicate the product vision and contributed to securing a $5M retail partnership opportunity.
Platform Scaling
Following launch, the experience expanded into Colors of the World.
Rather than redesigning the experience, the team was able to:
Reuse established interaction patterns
Extend existing components
Adapt campaign content without changing the core workflow
This validated an important early hypothesis:
The experience could support future initiatives without increasing complexity for users.
Refelction
What Worked
Framing the problem around user ownership rather than content delivery
Explicitly designing for both children and caregivers
Using caregiver testing to identify usability barriers early
Biggest Learning
The most valuable lesson from this project was recognizing how strongly caregiver comprehension influenced the success of a child-focused experience.
Designing for children required understanding not only how young users interacted with the product, but also how caregivers evaluated, trusted, and introduced it.
This insight continues to influence how I approach products designed for younger audiences.
What I Would Improve
Test with children earlier to gather deeper behavioral insights
Add stronger instrumentation for measuring engagement over time
Validate emotional engagement alongside usability metrics