GoldieBlox: Using Research To Design A Better Girls Engineering Toy

There were countless research insights that played a role in the product design of GoldieBlox, but here are some highlights:

1. Girls have strong verbal skills: This insight sparked the idea to utilize storytelling as a way to engage girls. All construction toys teach how to build with an instruction manual, but I for one have always hated those! So, I came up with the idea to write a children’s story about a kid inventor named Goldie and have the girls build along with her. At our target age range of K-3, it really leverages girls’ verbal skills. It’s great for early readers and uses girls’ confidence in reading to get them interested in building.

2. Girls have an innate sense of nurturing and like to help people: This inspired the story lines of GoldieBlox. We introduced quirky cute animal friends who Goldie needs to help. Rather than just building a cool machine, Goldie’s machines have purpose. This gives the “why” behind the building, which was incredibly important in getting girls to engage.

3. Girls have collaborative (rather than competitive) play patterns: While boys like to compete and destruct, girls prefer play scenarios where everybody wins. In Goldie’s first story, “GoldieBlox and the Spinning Machine,” she needs to figure out how to build a belt drive to spin all of her animal friends. It was fascinating to see how much girls got into the building when the scenario involved helping “everybody win.” We also decided on a flip book presentation-style format for the book so that multiple girls could enjoy it at once. We found girls liked playing GoldieBlox together and collaborating.

The top sources for the research were Why So Few study by AAUW , NCWIT study, and a meeting with Harvard Neuroscientist Joyce Benenson, who specializes in children’s play patterns, particularly around competition. Much of the insight on play patterns came from her and her work.

Playtime: testing the prototype with kids

I recruited the efforts of two design researchers trained at Cornell to help put together the research protocol for gathering data from user testing. We tested the prototype on over 100 kids (girls and boys, ages 4-12) by visiting the homes of over 40 families and 3 schools. We created our own quantitative and qualitative design research rubrics to take notes during the tests and evaluate the interaction. We also videotaped every test for further analysis.

Our biggest and most important finding was that the concept was solid: the book + toy combination worked really well in engaging girls to read the story and build along with Goldie. This was a big win.

Another top finding was how much kids enjoy interacting with the iPad and how a digital Goldie experience could really enhance the physical toy experience by providing narration (for kids who aren’t at the reading level yet), animation (to further clarify the building instructions) and encouragement (to prevent kids from giving up too quickly when the building gets challenging).

There are hundreds of little things we learned that impacted the final design. Here is an interesting one: In the book, Goldie builds a belt drive spinning machine in the shape of a star. We were testing on a standard hardware store pegboard and found a lot of girls getting frustrated that they couldn’t make the star symmetrical because of the hole placement on the board. We switched to a pegboard with off-set holes and put a picture of the star on the board to address this and the building experience dramatically improved.

The biggest change we made had to do more with the book narrative than with the toy. The original book had Goldie fail the first time on purpose, to show that it’s ok to fail, as long as you don’t give up. We found that almost everyone, from parents to children would get stuck at that point, trying their hardest to make it work without turning the page. We decided it was best to remove the outright failure, and instead include Goldie’s problem-solving process differently in the narrative.

One big surprise was what the kids built with GoldieBlox after the story was done. Instead of putting it away and playing with something else, they began playing make-believe with the characters and building their own inventions. We found kids building slingshots, cemeteries, classrooms, etc. They’d play act with the characters as they would with any other popular “pet shop” toy on the market, but they’d add in the construction pieces into the play. It was incredibly rewarding to watch that happen.

Another big surprise was how much boys also liked playing with GoldieBlox. Although the design had been carefully chosen to appeal to girls, almost all of the boys we tested on really got into it too.

The competition: competitive toys and the design process

Competitive products played a huge role in the design process. For starters, I bought competitors’ construction toys and observed children playing with them to get an understanding of how they could be improved. I’ve spent months observing how they market to kids and parents on the toy shelf as well as online and in the app space. The brand I’ve been following most closely is Lego Friends, who launched a big line of girl construction toys in January 2012. The biggest struggle for me in the design process has been figuring out how traditionally “girly” I’d need to make the toy in order to appeal to girls. Being able to follow the success (and criticism) of Lego Friends has helped me fine-tune my product design.

We also would like to invest in the storytelling aspect of GoldieBlox by video interviewing women in STEM fields to understand how they got to where they are and break down the stereotype that engineers are all nerdy white males who sit behind a computer all day! We’d love to re-tell these stories in a compelling way to continue making engineering more accessible to all generations.