Mega Unboxed Community Site

We partnered with Mattel to bring the Mega Unboxed Community Site to life. This platform served as a digital community hub for providing support, discussion and resources for a wide range of Mattel Products. The site included a fully featured supporting documentation finder, a well travelled multimedia forum, a custom design builder tool where users could share their creations, as well as export them to use at home!

Our role and solution

As the core technology partner for Mattel’s internal development team, we integrated seamlessly as an agile team within the broader Mattel IT organization. We were supplied with strict coding guidelines and processes, and were under the direct scrutiny and high standards of quality control from the Mattel’s regional VP of technology. It was quite a challenge, but we enjoyed working alongside such a talented team who shared our high standards.

Mattel’s site traffic is impressive, serving thousands of unique visitors a day. At this scale, and under this lens, a very specific set of criteria comes to bear. For example, even the length of a class name in an HTML file has a measurable effect on performance, and produce an analyzed cost difference. We had to ensure our code and asset creation was ultra efficient with zero fat.

Frontend development & API integration

In the complex product workflow from digital inception to being ready for public use, LittleBox was asked to serve multiple key roles:

• Frontend development: translating the rich visual design into a dynamic, functional interface.
• Technical design review, preparation and processing-to-asset, ready for the development lifecycle.
• Backend API integration: connecting seamlessly, and efficiently to the API, which was developed and maintained by Mattel’s internal team.
• As formal partners, we helped build the API contract and total template system that was ten used by all Mattel vendors in ongoing and future work.
• Partnered in developing the custom development VM and supply system used by third party vendors to facilitate dev inside the Mattel stack.

Documentation & quality assurance

To ensure alignment with Mattel’s expansive processes, we reviewed and authored technical documentation as part of a joint effort to improve the generalized integration of third party development teams. We helped manage the comprehensive testing and QA protocols used to guarantee the platform was robust, high-performing, and providing content delivery and community at scale. QA was a highly scrutinized and formalized process: the multi-business-unit life cycle meant issues needed to be fully resolved before advancing to the later stages of stakeholder QC.

Key outcomes

The end resultwas a popular community platform that empowered users to share their creativity and experiences in the Mattel world: a significant concrete execution of creating measurable customer engagement and loyalty from zeros and ones.

During the process we formed a cohesive and rewarding long term relationship with Mattel’s in-house development team, became a preferred vendor, and worked together on multiple projects over the next several years. Together, we not only played critical development roles in creating key components of the wider Mattel online ecosystem, but also developed fondational processes and standards used by all outside teams engaging in Mattel lead development.