Back to list

What Pokémon Taught Me About Onboarding New Hires

Client

Chewy

Audience

Customer Service Agents

Responsibilities

Led Design and Development

Tools Used

ChatGPT
Figma
ElevenLabs
After Effects
Articulate Storyline

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Overview

Chewy needed a fun, memorable way to introduce new Customer Service Agents to the internal teams that power Customer Care Operations. These behind-the-scenes teams play a vital role in shaping the customer experience—but new agents often lacked awareness of who they were, what they did, or when to reach out to them.

Problem

Traditionally, this information was delivered verbally by trainers during orientation. Unfortunately, the format wasn’t sticky—agents would quickly forget which team did what. This knowledge gap led to slower resolutions and misrouted escalations, impacting service quality. Chewy needed a better way to spotlight these unsung heroes.

Solution

I designed a Pokémon-style trading card activity, turning each internal team into a vibrant, anime-inspired character. This approach brought energy, humor, and collectibility to an otherwise dry org chart.

Inspired by my own experience playing Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, I wanted agents to experience that same sense of discovery and fun while learning about internal teams. The result: a lighthearted, gamified learning activity that delivered real knowledge retention.

Key Course Features

🃏 Anime-Inspired Trading Cards

Each internal team was represented as a collectible card featuring custom art, playful descriptions, and unique “abilities” tied to their real-world responsibilities.

🤝 Facilitated Group Game

Agents collected cards and played a team-matching trivia game, reinforcing learning through repetition and friendly competition.

😂 Humor + Style = Engagement

Every card used colorful imagery and witty copy to make team roles memorable—and fun.

Prototype Development

Title Screen

To create an immersive and themed experience, I started with the title screen. I used Vanta.js to generate a dreamy, animated cloud background using web code, which I embedded into Articulate Storyline as a web object.

To match the aesthetic of the trading card theme, I also found and used a Pokémon font generator that gave the title screen a playful and nostalgic feel.

Card Pack Animation

Next, I focused on the card pack animation. Using ChatGPT, I generated initial visual concepts for the card pack, then brought them to life in After Effects by designing a 3D rotating sphere effect.

I exported this animation as a still image for use in Storyline. To create the illusion of interactivity, I also exported side graphics of the card pack in left and right orientations, allowing it to shift visually when learners hovered over it.

Storyline’s Morph animation feature helped create smooth transitions between slides.

I used Storyline's Slider component to simulate the act of opening the card pack — a small detail that added a layer of tactile satisfaction to the experience.

Cards

For the cards themselves, I began by customizing a Pokémon card template in Figma, using Chewy’s visual branding while incorporating bold anime-inspired elements for energy and appeal

I started by customizing a in Figma. My goal was to mirror Chewy’s visual identity, while leaning into bold anime tropes for energy and appeal.

Each card represented an internal team, featuring original copy and imagery generated with the help of ChatGPT. Learners could click through these cards to explore each team's identity, responsibilities, and special traits.

To elevate the experience, I added voiceovers using ElevenLabs, selecting an anime-style female voice to narrate the team descriptions. Recognizing that not all learners enjoy audio, I included a mute button to ensure accessibility and learner control.

Finally, to reinforce learning, I built an interactive practice activity where learners matched realistic customer scenarios to the appropriate internal team. This helped tie abstract team roles to real-world agent decisions and improved knowledge retention through applied practice.

Results

✅ Transformed dry team info into a gamified, agent-friendly format
✅ Received positive feedback for being “fun,” “different,” and “actually helpful”
✅ Improved agent recall of internal teams and boosted confidence when escalating issues

Conclusion

By turning an internal org chart into a collectible card game, this project made team knowledge stick—while fostering the collaborative spirit that defines Chewy’s customer care culture. This approach is scalable for other complex topics that benefit from interactivity and memorability.