Tiny Tales
GV Sprint: Tablet App
Tiny Tales Tablet App
Second Solo Student Project for Springboard
Project Brief from BitesizeUX.com
I streamlined the decision making process for bedtime story selection.
My solution puts parents in charge and gives kids control to make simplified, constrained choices.
Timeline:
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“Official” 5-day GV-Style Sprint
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Wednesday, May 24, 2023
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Day 1: Understand / Map
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Day 2: Sketch the Solution
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Thursday, May 25, 2023
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Day 3: Storyboard
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Day 4: Prototype
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Friday-Saturday, May 26-27, 2023
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Day 5: Testing
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UI Iteration & 2nd Round Testing
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Tuesday-Friday, May 30 - June 2, 2023
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Prototype rebuild, fun with animations
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Monday, June 5, 2023
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2nd round testing
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My role: I acted independently in this simulated design sprint, using the project kit from BitesizeUX.com.
Their synthesized research presented a variety of possible user issues to tackle, and given the compressed timeline I adopted, decisions had to be made quickly.
Day 1: Understand / Map
Tiny Tales is a tablet e-reader app for kids aged 4-9 years. Parents and children often spend time with the app reading together, especially at bedtime.
Synthesis:
The project includes research resources to kick off the design sprint.
Synthesis based on 3 sources:
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Highlights from user interviews
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Full interview: Samantha
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Persona: Claire
The interview with Samantha and the highlights from the other interviews corroborate the synthesis represented by the persona named Claire. Primary themes are as follows.
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Children’s Interest
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Whimsical interest, changes week by week
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Sync books with current life events i.e. new school
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Reading Level / Age
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Matches individual child
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Good level for children with a small age gap i.e. 2-3 years apart
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Time Concerns
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Time taken out of reading time for searching and selecting
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Time to complete story
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Recommendations
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Posted reviews
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Family/friend recommendations
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What direction to go in? Which goal should I tackle?
Mapping the Goal:
I decided to focus on the time concerns. Choosing what to read at bedtime can take too much time, eating into the actual reading time.
I’m sure we’ve all experienced the same thing when scrolling Netflix or YouTube. In such cases, our “Watch later” playlist that we’ve fed into previously is a sure way to narrow down the selection and expedite the decision-making process.
Day 2: Sketch the Solution
If the parents are going to save time searching for stories to read during bedtime, they would benefit from preparing lists and libraries ahead of time.
I looked around at some popular websites that have similar features like YouTube and Spotify, but would a child of 4 be able to use a feature like that?
Since Tiny Tales is for kids, I wanted a simpler way than these text-heavy screens and menus to put books aside for later.
The most critical screen on the sketch above is the one on which the child chooses the books at bedtime. It needs to accommodate a child as young as 3.
Day 3: Storyboard
To achieve the goal of faster selection at bedtime, the range of selection must be reduced at bedtime.
The bedtime’s parameters are set ahead of time in a parents only page. They can set how many the children will choose from, and the total to read that night.
During the day the children can browse and read whatever they want, for as long as they want. They can also drag titles into the Bedtime Bin. Any books dropped here during the day will be first to be featured at bedtime. If no books are picked, the selections will be generated based on algorithms.
At a set time of day the app goes into Bedtime Mode, in which the app will only display the selections for that night. No more unlimited browsing. The “rules of the road” for the children are built into the app. You have 7 options, and we’re going to read 3.
Bedtime Mode puts parents in charge and gives kids control to make simplified, constrained choices.
Day 4: Prototype
Tiny Tales: Original Figma Prototype
I made some foolish choices with the UI in the initial prototype. Because the primary users are children, I left some icons unlabeled. This was very dumb. This meant that the user (usability tester) had to decode my intention for the icon based on the task I described. I didn’t make the same mistake when I iterated after first round testing.
Day 5: Testing
I recruited fellow students from the Springboard course who had experience reading bedtime stories to children.
What I learned from testing:
This design sprint project is merely a simulation of a real life, in-person sprint on a team. Thinking about the big picture of the project, I learned that it is hard to test the thing you really want to test.
What was I really testing when I set up my Zoom call interviews with my student peers?
I was actually testing whether my quickly thrown together interface communicated my design successfully enough for them to navigate it. It was basically a speed-UI skills test, and although I learned some quick lessons about UI, I don't think the testing I did would actually serve the imaginary company the project describes.
To test the feature profitably with real users, one would have to test in person, with parents and children, with a tablet, and not through Zoom. The child’s ability to tap and drag on a tablet is what I meant to simulate in the prototype, but testing through Zoom with PCs puts a barrier between the design and its true setting.
The best test would be to gather data over a period of time from users who had reported experiencing this project’s problem, and testing if the Bedtime Bin and Bedtime Mode reduced the selection time while not having a negative effect on the other considerations mentioned in the research.
This limitation of my testing was stated in other terms by one of my test participants when she said that...
...she couldn’t be sure if the Bedtime Mode would save time, or if it would raise other issues, because children can be unpredictable.
Iterated UI & 2nd Round Testing:
While certainly not perfect, I did improve the UI after the “official” sprint timeline. I also took the time to increase my skills with Figma animations, and just might have overdone it. But it was a lot of fun, and it will be a good stepping stone for later.
With the improvements made to the UI, and the restructuring of the passcode protected settings page, I observed the usability testers easily complete the tasks, and heard them describe my intentions accurately as they thought out loud.
This prototype sketch I would be confident bringing to my team in this hypothetical sprint scenario.