●Case study
Every Hot Wheels since 1968, cataloged and searchable, in one collector's app.
01 — Context
Hot Wheels has released new castings and variants continuously since 1968. Collectors were tracking what they owned across spreadsheets, forums, and memory — with no shared, searchable record of a catalog that deep. Showcase is Mattel's answer: organize your collection, discover what you're missing, and help improve a community-enhanced database.
I led design on a two-person team, working alongside one other designer, from early concept through the Oct 2025 launch.
02 — The system
Before any screen shipped, I architected the design system from scratch: 500+ components on a primitive-to-semantic token architecture, built to WCAG AA from day one. New castings arrive constantly, and the catalog UI has to keep up without a redesign every quarter. The system is what makes monthly feature releases possible — not a nice-to-have alongside them.
03 — Recognition & search
Showcase Lens turns a photo of a physical car into a catalog match: camera-based car recognition, using Google Lens attribute extraction to identify body style, color, and finish, then matching that against the product database. It's designed to disappear into the moment a collector is already in — snap a photo, get the match, keep sorting the shelf.
Search works the same way search should: type a partial name, a year, a series, and get there. Filters now surface upfront, before a search even runs, so narrowing 30,000+ cars by detail doesn't mean a second pass.
04 — The discovery redesign
Launch traffic to search-triggered lookups ran well past what the team had modeled. Instead of throttling the experience, I moved invocation from page load to explicit search intent, behind a refreshed Discover page. Collectors browsing still got a fast, populated home screen — the heavier lookup only fired when someone actually searched. [PAULA: confirm the one-week turnaround detail from your resume before it goes in the public copy.]
05 — Community loop
Report an error on a car's details, request a vehicle that's missing from the catalog, earn badges for collection milestones, and scan a QR code at live events to unlock badges on the spot. Each loop feeds the community-enhanced database the same way the official Showcase positioning describes it — collectors correcting and completing the record, not just browsing it.
06 — Receipts
Selected version history, from the App Store listing:
"very simple to use and learn" — App Store review
Other App Store reviews call out the collection-organizing flow and ask for a faster way to log cars in bulk. [PAULA: pull 1-2 more exact short quotes yourself from the App Store listing — I didn't want to risk misquoting reviewers from a truncated fetch.]
07 — Outcomes
500K+ downloads in eight months, with zero performance-marketing spend. Retention climbed steadily post-launch as monthly feature releases kept the app worth opening. Rated 4.8 by collectors on the App Store.
View on the App Store