Craft, one of the leading note taking apps and winner of Apple’s coveted App of the Year award, has been using Play to design and prototype features in their recent release of Craft 3.0.

“We had this idea for a bento box display for all of the styles in your docs. I wanted to use different native materials and blurs and the main struggle was how all these materials would look in the final product.

We tried to get them as close as possible in Figma, but its not how the materials actually look and work in iOS. It’s also really hard to communicate with engineers as well because these blurs and materials in Figma don’t translate to how they will create them in iOS.”

— Daniela Muntyan, Product Designer

With Play, the Craft team was able to:

• Design new features using Play's native materials and blurs, which was challenging to do in Figma

• Reduce production timelines by weeks

• Work more effectively with engineering to translate the design vision to code accurately and faster

• Create prototypes that felt native and were easy to share with App Clips

At the end of 2024, Craft launched their biggest update in years with Craft 3.0. In this case study, we’re going behind the scenes to take a look at how the team used Play's native materials and blurs as well as advanced prototyping capabilities to bring some of their ideas to life.

Why Play?

We spoke with Daniela Muntyan, a Product Designer at Craft who has been working on Craft 3.0 for over a year, to talk about her process and how she came to use Play in her workflow.

How did you start using Play?

“I started using Play about six months ago. We always have a huge amount of questions on how a prototype will actually look and feel on the phone because it’s almost impossible to achieve that level of quality with Figma. It’s going to feel laggy and not native.

After using Play for a while I realized it is the perfect tool for us because we care so much about the nativeness of our app.”

Can you tell us about the culture of prototyping and sharing ideas at Craft?

”We’re very focused on prototyping and showcasing ideas and designs as close to what the real product will look like. It’s quite important for us to communicate our ideas in high fidelity, especially when it comes to things like materials and interactions. Typically, we’ll do some drafts and sketches in Figma and maybe even some simple prototypes in Figma, which end up being pretty rough. And we usually share these prototypes as a video, which isn’t the best.”

Designing the new Bento Box Feature in Craft 3.0

What were some of the challenges when designing new features for Craft 3.0?

“We had this idea for a bento box display for all of the styles in your docs. I wanted to use different native materials and blurs and the main struggle was how all these materials would look in the final product.

We tried to get them as close as possible in Figma, but its not how the materials actually look and work in iOS. It’s also really hard to communicate with engineers as well because these blurs and materials in Figma don’t translate to how they will create them in iOS.”

How did you use Play to help make this process better?

“It was so simple to go into Play and design using the real native materials. It was just amazingly cool for us. I shared the prototype with the team and instantly everyone understood the vision and how it would work. It saved us a huge amount of time and reduced tons of back and forth.”

Designing the new Insert Menu Feature

Can you tell us about the process for designing the new insert menu feature?

“I used Play for our new insert menu feature too. Since it uses materials again, it was important to be able to see how the menu would look overlayed on different pages. It was also really amazing to use things like the real progressive blur! The engineering team was really happy to see this using the real materials instead of a proxy like in Figma.”

Using Play for Creating & Sharing Prototypes

How are you using Play for interactive prototypes?

"I was trying to create this prototype in Figma. The two biggest issues I had was that Figma wasn’t able to handle all this complexity and the prototype didn’t feel high quality on my phone. Again, since we are a native app, I want the gestures in the prototype to feel real and run smooth and Figma wasn’t able to achieve that.

It was a game changer when I then moved to Play. I knew it would feel more native and Play would be able to handle this complexity and styling.

Using Play helped us get to a better product and saved multiple weeks just for this one individual feature.”

What’s been the best part about using Play?

“Outside of designing with real materials and the incredible prototyping capabilities, I love sharing the prototypes with an App Clip. It's an amazing way for anyone to experience the prototype without needing to install anything at all.

Using Play really helps the engineering team too since you are designing more 1:1 with Swift. I can even use the parameters and values from the code panel to give to our dev team."