Design Thinking @tonies GmbH

Design Thinking @tonies GmbH

Context

The story starts in 2013, when Patric Fassbender began to face a problem over and over again: Scratched audio-book CD´s that were meant to be used by his two kids. CD´s starting over and over again because they were damaged, Fassbender began trying to find an alternative way of giving his children access to audio books – always in mind, not just giving them any device with a sceen. After realizing there was no good alternative, he decided to build his own new device for children: The TonieBox.

The Journey

Participants and their background:

Patric Fassbender, who grew up in Düsseldorf, Germany came across typography because his brother in law was one of the best lettering artists in Europe. He lived in Amsterdam and during his visits he received alot of creative inputs from his brother. After school he decided to live a year in Amsterdam to have several creative mini- jobs for different publishers. From that he later decided to go back to Düsseldorf to study graphic design. This was a door-opener to work for different digital agencies, making his way as a graphic designer first, and a creative director for many years later in  his career.

Later when starting the project Patric soon realized that he may have had alot of knowledge and background in the creative and “designy” sector, but he lacked alot in financial and technological background. 

Therefore he asked Marcus Stahl for help, who he had known because their children went to the same kindergarten and together they did some origanisatorial work there. After earning his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and a master’s in Business Administration, Marcus started working for Nokia Automotive for many years. When Nokia decided to shut down the facility in Bochum, where Marcus was working, he decided to found his own automotive supplier company with some colleagues from his earlier job at Nokia. Afer a few years the company began to make losses, resulting in Marcus leaving his own company. Luckily this was about the time Patric was asking for his help. Together they created tonies GmbH.

How do Tonieboxes actually work?

Basically you have a soft, cube-shaped box that works as an audio player. You can play audiobooks, music or custom audio on your Tonibox. The main difference to regular audio-players is that there is no screen and the box is fully designed to be handled by young kids. There are no buttons or complicated controls. To adjust the volume, you have to squeeze the ears of the box, tap the sides to skip tracks or tilt the box to the left/right to fast forward/rewind the current playing track. To start playing audio you simply need to put a so-called “Tonie” (coming from the german word “Tonträger” = sound carrier) on top of the box. Tonies are small figures that are sold separately. There are many different Tonies available, some contain stories that are self created by the tonies team, some contain licenced audios e.g Disneys The lion king. This simply works via a built-in NFC-chip inside the box and the Tonies. When connecting a new Tonie for the first time, the box downloads the content of the Tonie onto the box, so it can be used anywhere, without having to be connected to the internet the next time. Some Tonies are called “Creative-Tonies”. They allow parents or loved ones to record their own stories, messages or songs through the Tonie-App, making every Creative Tonie a unique experience for the kids. 

How Fassbender used Design Thinking to create the Box

Even though he did not talk about the actual phases of Design Thinking and which event he would put into what phase of the process of creating the Toniebox, we can clearly see the approach in the journey from the first idea over the prototype down to the actual finished product.

As mentioned it all started with him facing the same problem over and over again: CD´ that were used by his kids to listen to audiobooks quickly got scratches and therefore were damaged. Because of this he started digitizing every audio he bought for his kids as a first step in case they were not able to play them anymore. Having enough of that he began searching for alternatives, finding out the only “real” solution would be getting a smarthphone/mp3-player type like device. He actually found some Hello-Kitty styled devices, not satisfying his problem enough, because then his kids would use a screen-having device way too early. Not wanting that to happen, the idea of a new screenless and child-friendly device was born. I think this is a mixture of two of the phases of design thinking, since he first emphatized with the situation by observing a problematic situation at his “customers” – his children. Understanding the situation this seamlessly fades into the second phase: Define. Analyzing the situation and generating a clear problem statement: There is a leakage of a screenless-children friendly device to play audio on. 

From there he started ideating to develop a first approach to the problem. He quotes that one of the most important things in the process of designing the box was: “By far the most important thing is to fully put yourself in the target audience’s shoes. Only this perspective counts. It’s not exactly a new insight, but unfortunately, it’s not always consistently practiced. Of course, I’ve also studied design for children on a theoretical level and read a lot about it”.

He also mentioned that luckily, he always had the target audience at home, making it pretty easy to constantly receive feedback on ideas: “But since I was fortunate enough to have the target audience at home, I was able to observe my daughters using products practically around the clock. This made me realize how many products were developed purely from an adult perspective, especially when it came to electronic products. I wanted to do things differently. After all, the goal was to solve a specific problem in the children’s room that the target audience would appreciate”.

Therefore he started to develop a first prototype, just like the next step would be in the Design Thinking process. As you can see in the picture below, the first prototype was actually pretty close to the actual today’s design:

He then presented his idea to his kids, who were very enthusiastic about it – making him want to realize his idea in the actual world even more. His approach was to focus on three things first: Design, Haptic and User Experience. The technological aspect was secondary at this stage of the process. For example his design requirement was that parents would not feel the need to remove the device from their field of vision once the children were in bed. The design should also appeal to parents and be relatively simple. Given the target audience, sturdiness was also an important thing to always keep in mind. This was about the time he reached his limits – he had created a good prototype and conceptual design, but he was missing the technological and financial inputs to be able to realize his project. Therefore he showed his mockup to Marcus to get him on board. 

Luckily they were able to find some investors (actually some of their childhood friends) to financialize the first prototypes and testing objects.

There is an often citized saying: “Less is more”, which is one of the key concepts he tried to keep in mind when designing the first prototypes. That’s why they tried to leave out as many complicated functions as possible, creating a clear design. When it comes to haptic he again tried to keep the most important thing in mind: The customers and less is more. Haptic should be fun to kids, giving them a warm feeling. It should not feel like some kitchen-like device, resulting in giving the cube a soft surface, just like a stuffed animal. From there on he began creating lots of drafts, drawing different cubes again and again. The team then tried to give the product a “soul”, something that makes it unique. This is actually how they came to the idea of giving every site of the cube a different function: Some space for placing the Tonies ontop, a charging port at the bottom and navigation at the left and right site.

With that beeing clear the technical issues had to be solved: How should the “buttons” work, how do you get figures to start playing audio on the box and how can you make sure, this also works when you’re on the way and dont have wifi-acces. As you can see we are making our way through the prototype phase. Those “buttons” are realized by little ears that are ontop of the box. Squeezing them leads to adjusting the volume while holding them turns the box on for example. Those are the only “real” buttons on the box. That’s where the “less is more” and child-friendly approach really comes into its own. If you want to fast forward/backward into the audio playing you simply have to tilt the box to the left or right, no buttons needed at all. But not everything took a good turn in the first steps. When deciding what kind of firmware to use – some open source approach or a complete selfmade inhouse developmen, they decided for the second option resulting in delaying the original first release date by a few months – not amusing the investors. To close down the Design Thinking process we get to the last stage: Testing. For that Fassbender and Stahl used so-called UX-labs. UX-labs are specialized spaces or facilities designed to systematically test and analyze the usability and overall user experience of products. This time they mostly focused on the view of parents when using the product, because they are the ones making the buy/no-buy decision. The most important thing here was to actually focus on the setup process – again trying to keep things as easy as possible when it comes to steps like connecting the box to your WIFI or creating some custom content with the creative-tonies.

The results

This project can definitely be rated as successful. Here are some hard facts: In their launch year in 2016 the team set their own goal to sell about 15.000 boxes – getting them alot of comments about if they were completely delusional. In fact in the christmas business of 2016 they actually sould out completely with over 36.000 boxes just shortly after they got launched. Today there are more than 100 million Tonies and more than 8 million boxes sold, resulting in a revenue of 158 million euros in 2022. They also expanded in new markets such as America or the United Kingdom. There are more than 1000 different Tonies available today, including world wide known licence partners such as Warner Bros or Disney. 

Future projects 

One of the newet inventions is a story generator based on ChatGPT, making it possible for parents to write a prompt into the app, which then creates a child friendly story for the kids to listen to. Those stories can either be recorded by the parents themself, or the app can use a text-to-speech technology to automatically generate an audio file which can be saved onto one of the creative tonies to carry this story, in my opinion one of the most useful, actual usable ways I have seen for AI.  

Risks & Challenges for the future 

One of the most important issues right now for the company is to scale their growth well enough. Starting in Düsseldorf with only a small team, there are now more than 500 employees worldwide. Managing such a big team has become one of the biggest challenges Fassbender said. Also there is one thing to keep in mind saleswide: At some points kids will get too old to use the Toniebox (the main target group is 3-6 years), generating a big second hand market for the boxes and the Tonies. This is why they always have to bring out new content or create content even for older kids, to keep their own sales up.

Lessons learned for us

In my opinion the fundamental takeaway here is the way the box was designed: Always having the key users – the kids- in focus. Everything about this box is created to provide a great user experience for them, meaning keeping things as simple as possible.

I also think it’s very interesting how little they cared about the technical implementation in the first place, keeping in mind how much decisions they had to make. My favourite quote of Fassbender is: ”We have indeed had to make a lot of decisions. It’s in the nature of things if you want to make progress. And that can be really fun. There were also some wrong decisions, but that’s part of it … The important thing is how you deal with it. It’s very important that you’re not afraid to make decisions, even if you’re not 100% sure, you have to decide. It’s better than not making a decision at all”.

By Moritz Schürmann

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References:

Note: All links were last visited at 06.04.2025

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