BETHANIE COLWELL
STUDENT CENTERED DESIGN
TinyTales
An improved eBook experience that makes reading time fun
for families
Role
UX/UI Design
Methods & Tools
GV Design Sprint Process
Adobe XD
Invision
Date
May 2020
Practices
Lightning Demos
Crazy 8 Sketching
Rapid prototyping
OVERVIEW
As a single designer in this weeklong GV Design Sprint exercise, I designed, prototyped, and tested the Tiny Tales 2.0 experience. Tasked with reimagining the user experience of the eBook tablet app, I first got a clear view of the problem, sketched solutions, and developed the most viable. After prototyping, I tested my hypothesis with users - parents and grandparents.
PROBLEM
Overcoming choice paralysis to agreement
Parents are finding that too much of a good thing is not a good thing; the wealth of new titles from up and coming authors Tiny Tales offers requires filtering and user-specific experiences, based on interest.
Like scrolling endlessly to find the exact thing you want to hear or see, the filterless Tiny Tales library is leading to user frustration, wasted time, and a departure from the intended experience: quality family time.
Not only is finding the right story difficult, so is finding agreement between siblings and parents.
PARENT NEEDS
Users of this eBook tablet app are parents with children ages 3-10. To optimize the Tiny Tales 2.0 experience, parents want their needs, child's interests, and reading level to be taken into consideration.
Know the approximate length
Parents need to know the approximate reading time of the story upfront. Expectation: flip preview, reading time estimate.
Curated choices, like an online store
Parents expect an online store experience, with limited choices and recommendations based on reviews and past selections.
Connection to grade level
Since Tiny Tales features new authors, parents want a connection to the classics and grade-level content.
Parents use Tiny Tales to as a teaching tool, to bring up tough stuff with their kids. Their kiddos, on the other hand, want entertainment and mood-specific choices.
Family bonding
Nightly reading time is a sacred family ritual; agreeing on what to read is the core challenge.
A different experience than their kids
SOLUTION
TinyTales 2.0 fosters quality family time, making choosing a story a no-brainer.
My goal was to design a delightful nightly family ritual that would alleviate argument by rotating through each family member as the designated choice-maker.
With improved filtering and choice boards, the goal is for parents to quickly and easily find a story that fits the mood and fall asleep with smiles their angel's faces.
PROCESS
Organization, filtering & delight
Since the Amazon Fire 7 Kids Edition is the most popular tablet for the target audience, I started my hunt with Amazon which proved futile. At quick search, kid content was just another category in the universe. Too much, moving on. I wanted to answer three core questions:
How do spaces organize a ton of content?
PHYSICAL
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Fiction (Genre)
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Non-fiction (Dewey)
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Interest Level (age)
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Text Difficulty (grade)
ONLINE
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Mood
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Feature
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Most Popular
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Based on your likes/previous
Who does filtering right?
Medium’s filterless filters establish a user profile from a large choice board during onboarding and filters all content based on it, alleviating the choice paralysis problem.
Two layers of filtering are becoming clear. First, filter out by interest. Then, to accommodate children’s ever-changing desires, filter by genre in the daily user experience.
How to add delight in choice?
Through Crazy 8 sketching, user-specific choice boards, selection wheels, and mood organization were explored.
Improving the tactile experience for a child, various wheels and dials were sketched, but returned to the research: kids are fickle, adorable creatures. Their desires change with their moods. The daily selection needs to somehow be based on mood, like Spotify.
Organizing by mood is user-centered and fun with prompts like: How are you feeling today? What are you in the mood for? While this works for the children’s experience, the parents need more than that.
Mood does not meet the parents’ needs expressed in the research. Parents use Tiny Tales as a teaching tool. Based on the interviews, the parents want/need these options:
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Highest reviewed
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Based on your history
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Tough stuff/life lessons
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Monthly feature (e.g. Black History Month)
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Ten-minute tales
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Connect to classics
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On grade level
DESIGN DECISIONS
After empathizing with parents, creating the bedtime ritual began. The main goals that emerged out of decision day include:
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Optimize quality time by making choosing fun
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Create an evening family ritual, where each member will have equal voice and choice in story selection on their day of the week.
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Incorporate family member profiles for filtering and recommendations
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Develop a tagging system and filtering menu to make finding a book easy
Tiny Tales 2.0
With the child profiles in place, the returning user login delivers on the core goal of creating a fun family ritual, while maintaining parent control.
The design is built around the bright purple logo and electric aqua accent with fun complementary avatars representing typical genres found in children's literature. The parent choice board cover all the parent needs detailed in the brief, with flip previews and recommendations to save time choosing.
Daily selection based on our child's ever-changing moods and interests
A child's character interests are determined during the Medium-inspired "filterless filter" onboarding for each sibling. With interests in place, a child chooses the genre he or she is in the mood for on any given day with fun avatars to represent typical genres you would find in a library.
Ritual Rotation puts an end to arguments
With an option to turn on in the first step of onboarding, parents can choose to make a ritual out of the Tiny Tales experience, the last step on a checklist before bed.
Take the argument out of story selection but rotating through family members, parents included! You will have to wait for your turn to choose the highly-rated new title featured in the new and improved library.
Spend more quality family time with choices catered to your interests
Similar to an online store, Your Library features a weekly series feature, new titles, based on your history, and most loved. With a flip preview and estimated reading time, parents and kids alike choose the story that is best for them.
Still can't decide from your suggested top 3? Why not let Tiny Tales decide with a surprise!
TESTING
ASSUMPTIONS
Will Ritual Rotation work for families?
The five test participants are two grandparents and three mothers with children ages 5-10. Each mother have a similar e-book app that their children use and are knowledgeable about the space; the grandparents rarely use tablet apps.
All mothers cite that age range poses a challenge for their youngest readers; the younger listens, while Mommy or the older child reads aloud.
Ritual Rotation Pros - All participants choose to keep the Ritual Rotation on during onboarding and expressed delight in the option
Ritual Rotation Cons - Mom 1 is not satisfied that it would meet her kids' specific reading level. This supermom reads separately with each of her children, according to their grade level.
"Cecily (5) and Eli (9) have nothing in common. I don't think this would work for us." - Mom 2
"The boys would not notice the add sibling button. Highlight that more." - Mom 1
"Sometimes I have less than 10 minutes to read with Cecily but want to keep her in the habit." - Mom 2
"My kids would love this, but can I personalize it?" - Mom 3
Organization & failing fast
KEY LEARNINGS
Overall, Tiny Tales taught me a lot about organization - how to approach multiple layers of filtering and a wealth of content. It also taught me not to reinvent the wheel and to borrow bits and pieces from various sources. To do this well, I need to understand more about what is going on in the back end filtration/tagging.
Through the GV Design Sprint process, I learned my main goal of the collective family reading time may not work for the majority of families with a wide child age gap. Could averaging each child's reading level work in most cases?
To continue this project, this and other key issues need to be addressed:
Moving forward
In order to bring more delight and personalization to the next iteration of the Tiny Tales 2.0 experience, additional features include:
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Incentivize - celebration upon completion, mark complete
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Personalization - more delight with child avatar creation
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Parental control - more options for parents
