Rare Bits x Crunchyroll
At Rare Bits, we partnered with Crunchyroll to create a white-label digital collectibles mobile app to support and strengthen their overall customer engagement strategy.
Team
The Rare Bits team that tackled design for this project:
Visual Designer (me)
UX Designer
Product Manager
Founders
Process
The process for this project was highly iterative and collaborative. As half of our design team, I was able to regularly contribute to the ideation, research, execution, and analysis of design solutions throughout our mobile app. Below is an example of some of the many solutions considered to solve for a small banner element within our app.
Challenges
Working as a startup partnering with a larger company brings both opportunties and challenges. We were fortunate to have some really valuable colleagues on the Crunchyroll team to collaborate with, but there are still pain points that can come with working outside of your own organization.
One example was having to quickly learn and understand Crunchyroll's style guide, and translate that into a brand new mobile app that has its own personality as well. With their brand colors leaning heavily into orange and black, it was a challenge to use dark colors in a way that didn't feel too much like Halloween. We decided to use a spectrum of cool grays and blacks to create visual separation between cards and elements, and lean into Crunchyroll's orange, teal, and gold brand colors as accents to catch user's attention and communicate functionality in an unobtrusive way.
Interaction Design
One example of taking ownership of an important feature was leading the design and flow of our new trading feature. This involved working cross-functionally with Product Manager and UX Designer to talk with users and whiteboard design solutions, then working closely with engineers for handing off the final designs.
Every Screen Matters
In a quickly growing app, it’s easy to neglect screens that don’t feel like a P0. I took the initiative to do regular design audits and provide new design updates and expertise to create a polished, professional experience.
Visual Design
A large part of my role was also to polish and finalize the final visual design of the screens within our app.
Results
Our app monetizes users in the Crunchyroll ecosystem who aren’t subscribers and adds 12% incremental value for already paying subscribers. Additionally, Average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) trended strongly upward, indicating high payer retention and potential for huge lifetime value (LTV)
