Background
TinyTales is a tablet app where authors and illustrators publish children's stories for parents to read with their children. They have short stories, illustrated books, educational stories, and much more!
For this modified Google Venture Design Sprint, my goal was to design an app to make it easier for parents to find great stories to read with their children using the TinyTales app.
Problem
Parents have found it difficult and time-consuming to find the right stories to read with their kids
They have to flip through books before reading to see how long they are
It's hard to figure out if the content is appropriate for their children
Solution
Create child/family-specific profiles and reading topics
Visual Tags/Filters
Role
UX Designer
UI Designer
Constraints
5 Days
Tools
Paper and Pencil
Figma
Process
Understand
Decide
Validate
Sketch
Prototype
Day 1 - Understand and Map
User Interviews
TinyTales provided me with 12 user interviews answering the prompt:
Tell me about how you choose a book or story to read to your children.
After synthesizing the data, one main theme emerged:
The persona, Monica, reflects TinyTale's main user. Referencing the persona over the next five days helped me continually empathize with my users and remain focused (and at times be reminded to focus) on users' main goals and pain points.
HMW help parents and children quickly find appropriate books to read?
Mapping
Goal: to help users of all ages, especially young ones, feel successful when choosing books to read
Wanted to keep the process simple and emulate the real world as much as possible
Thought about how kids and adults choose books in a school or library setting
Focused mainly on the younger kid's journey, knowing it would create a solution for all users
Made parents and kids one user type because research showed finding a book was done together or kids were in charge of finding the books before parents made the final decision
Ultimately, I decided to move forward with the middle route because it was a part of the search route and needed before users could use the saved route.
Day 2 - Sketch
Lightning Demos
I looked at the apps Epic!, BrainPOP, and NYT Cooking to get ideas for how other apps have solved the time issue when picking content. I took quick sketches of their screen setups to refer back to when sketching my own ideas.
Biggest takeaways:
Crazy 8's
I determined the home screen would be the most critical because it would guide users to books and topics based on their needs and preferences.
While working through the sketches, I realized not every screen needed to be completely different from the last, but that it was a good opportunity to mix and match ideas. I started building off my previous sketches and seeing how multiple ideas could fit with one another.
Using inspiration from the lightning demos, my sketches included:
Large interactive elements
Visual filters
Different categories
Simple organization.
I decided to move forward with the starred sketch because it combined multiple elements to help the user quickly find beens to read:
Suggested content curated for the user
Topics to search by
Book suggestions
Visual tags on the books
Solution Sketch
Sketching the screens before and after the most critical screen, helped organize and direct my focus moving into day three.
Day 3 - Decide And Sketch
Storyboard
Creating the storyboard allowed me to try out multiple different ideas before creating higher-fidelity screens.
Using the storyboard as a low-fidelity prototype, I tested the design quickly to see if I had achieved:
Creating a simple interface
Providing the necessary tools/interactions for users to find books fitting their various needs quickly
Somewhere along the way during storyboarding, I lost sight of my user journey from day one; oops!
Designs should be ever-evolving throughout the process, but design sprints are so quick, that not sticking to my route led me to waste time designing unnecessary screens. It would have been better to stick to the original route during this sprint and flush out new ideas in another sprint.
Day 4 - Prototype
Keeping my focus on kids using the app independently to find books to read with their parents, I wanted to:
Keep the app as simple as possible.
Use large buttons.
Use simple colors and let the book covers draw the kids in (because we all know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover… but it’s hard not to!).
Stick to user interactions that anyone already using an iPad would be familiar with and non-iPad users would find intuitive: taps and swipes.
Day 5 - Validate
Usability Testing
I conducted usability tests with parents, nannies/babysitters, and one elementary school teacher with a very young child at home. Not all of my five participants ended up being ideal users for various reasons, but through watching and listening I gained insight into their pain points and positive interactions.
Homepage
Participants liked:
They could pick and edit the family topics.
How it wouldn’t take many clicks to find a book to read.
The accessibility of the large imagery.
The visual tags under each book (even if the tags were confusing, they could see how it could be helpful to them).
Final Screens
Homepage - Top
Homepage - Family Topics
Homepage - Bottom
Social Emotional Learning Books
Social Emotional Learning Books - Book Info Overlay
Book - Cover
Next Steps
Based on additional user testing feedback I’d:
Add more precise time estimations to the book details overlay.
Add a read-aloud option to the stories so kids could use the app independently, even if they aren’t reading independently yet. This would help parents foster their child's independence, while also promoting early literacy skills.
Provide parent resources in the form of general and book-specific reading comprehension questions; to help engage kids in the stories and build reading comprehension skills.
Test the updated prototype with more users (including kids!) and do another design sprint using the data to see how TinyTales could be improved.
Learnings
Quick, but thoughtful decision-making is key throughout the rapid iterations of a GV design sprint. This sprint helped me feel more confident in my decision-making as a designer. It reinforced how iterative the design process is, and that it’s okay to make changes in the moment as new information is presented (but I should try not to make changes that create unnecessary work too!).
Getting the correct participants for user testing matters, but you can always learn something if you watch and listen.
Test all user groups. Not being able to test a primary group of users (kids) leaves you with questions about the usability of your product for all users.