Tiny Tales
Kids reading app
Tiny Tales 5-Day Sprint
The Brief: Parents have been reading to their children for ages but, as traditional paperback books have transitioned into digital, the selection process for actually choosing a book has become overwhelming. Every choice is available to you now online, where perhaps options for reading were more contained in decades past. Tiny Tales is a child book provider in the digital space that is seeking to make it easier to pair reading material with families looking to enjoy them with their children.
The Problem: According to the materials in the brief provided by Tiny Tales, parents are simply overwhelmed with all the options they have. Simplifying this process will go a long way in selecting books not only more quickly, but with confidence in their selection.
The Solution: Rather than presenting all the available search criteria at once, my approach was to limit the choices and spread them out over a few steps to avoid overwhelm. And by choosing a design that would be appealing to children as well as adults, the hope was to minimize any visual intimidation as users narrowed down their search.
The Designer's Role: As the sole designer on this project, I not only read through all the briefing materials and existing research, but also made the decisions on what areas toImprove upon and put together the designs myself based on my initial sketch ideas.
Day 1: The brief provided by Tiny Tales was incredibly helpful, and established the basis for my solutions to their problem. There were highlights from user interviews, and even a full-length audio recording with a mother discussing her book selection process in detail. From these materials I put together sticky notes with the main themes and issues being addressed, and created an initial flow map that I thought would alleviate many of the pain points being discussed.
Day 2: Once a flow was established to filter search results based on the user feedback, I began some competitive research on established brands within the book industry. I was immediately able to empathize with the overwhelm of choices presented on the first page of a website or app. I began to formulate designs in my mind that would decrease the breadth of choices thrust upon the user from their very first interaction with the app.
A helpful exercise encouraged on this day of the sprint was the familiar Crazy 8 sketching. While I initially struggled to break the mold of what I’d seen as the common layout of similar brands, it was actually surprising to find that my last sketch was the one I elected to move forward with. This “out there” idea was intended to be more playful, almost as if the users were intended to be the children themselves.
Day 3: Once I had committed to the child-friendly, paper mache style design from my sketches, I sketched a few more screens that incorporated my previous flow ideas. Again, the idea here was to present only a few select choices at a time to users so as not to overwhelm them with the enormous possibilities as they progressed in choosing books to read.
Day 4: By this point in the 5-day sprint, I was eager to get to some actual digital designs. Bypassing the traditional wireframe step, my limited time meant that it was really essential that I have a workable prototype to begin testing with users. While the design remained relatively low-fi like a wireframe, I also incorporated colors, shapes and iconography that I was hoping would survive the testing phase.
Day 5: It was a real challenge designing the prototype in such a short span of time. While I felt good about the general layout, I wasn't terribly confident in a lot of the visual choices. Fortunately, the user testing actually guided a lot of these decisions as iterations were implemented to reach a final design. Feedback I got ranged from radical color changes, to consistency issues, and also the combining or even complete removal of certain buttons & elements.
Key Findings & Conclusions: While I was delighted that several of my core ideas & concepts for a simplified search process flow held fast, the user testing phase revealed a lot about the visual aesthetic of the app that I was losing objectivity on. This project, perhaps more than any other up to this point, was a great lesson in following the data received in the form of user feedback. And as always, room for improvement remains. But to see what can be accomplished in a short week-long sprint inspires confidence in what can be realized during longer timeframes, especially when working with a group of designers rather than just on my own.