TinyTales
Design Sprint
Application Design Sprint for Quicker Storytime Selections
Mobile Application Design Sprint
5/30/2022- 6/19/2022
I worked on this project as a lead designer and product manager.
Main areas of responsibility:
Content Research
Application Design
Preliminary Sketches
Lo-fidelity Prototyping (basic flow and interactions)
Hi-fidelity Prototyping and Mock Up
Summary:
Reading together can be an amazing bonding experience for a parent and child. TinyTales is an app looking to enhance this relationship by curating story time. The purpose of this sprint was to help develop a more efficient way for parents to quickly find a story that would meet their needs.
The Challenge:
In this Application Design Sprint, I reigned in myself to really focus on a few main characteristics.
1. How might we speed up the story selection time and
2. How might we focus the search in areas that the parent or child would be interested in.
This would need to be performed in a Design Sprint setting. The challenge would be creating something and testing this design in the short time period allowed. This meant I needed to Map, Sketch, Decide, Prototype and Test. While most of these tasks would be handled as part of a team, I would be performing the duties myself. This in and of itself posed its own set of challenges. It can be hard to be the only one to Ideate as well as making the decisions. This was made more difficult because while the Design Sprint Prompt allowed for a lot of context to incorporate into my design, there was little to no indication of what the app would already have in terms of features. This made it difficult to target my approach, but in the end, all of these setbacks would need to be overcome by the end of the sprint.
Design Sprinting:
The solution required focus on the main goals. I really needed to distil what was actually being asked so that I was designing a “feature” of an app and not the entire app. This meant I needed to scour the research documentation for any and all feedback that I could glean from the interviews and persona that was built out for me.
Once I had a more robust understanding of what type of user would be intersecting with this app it was clear that my target audience really wanted to focus on speed and content. The trick would be trying to incorporate this end goal in a meaningful way.
First I started by looking at other iPad based reading applications for an idea of what is more standard practice. A lot of reading applications have a main “library” view where you can scroll and search through hundreds of books. This is the first assumption I made for TinyTales, if this was a reading application, I thought it was safe to assume that this is where they would be at a minimum. A large library of hundreds of titles, but this would not provide the user with a quick way to find their story in the midst of bedtime. This is also when I came across an application called Skybrary. This provided a fun themed set of floating islands for children to explore titles in various categories (i.e famous people, fantasy stories or animal kingdom).
GoodReads App
Vooks App
Skybrary App
After this inspiration I went on creating a user flow map for the persona of Claire. This led to a map of about 8 steps before Claire was able to start reading a book with her child. There was room for more efficiency. But this brought the end to my first day of the design sprint.
Day two, I first decided on which part of my user flow would be the most important to dive into. For this exercise, I sketched out the possible designs of my “Refine Results” step using the Crazy 8’s method. I drew 8 different sketches within a minute for each one. I now had a choice from 8 different critical screens that I would use to design the screen before and after.
On day 3, I would start the decision process by creating a storyboard. Filling out the process flow with sketches by branching out from my previous created storyboard panels.
Day 4, I took my storyboard and created a low-fidelity mockup using the Marvel app. This worked well for creating a digital representation of what I had sketched, however it did leave something to desire in terms of style. The rough design available in this web application limited my ability to create something more accurate in my depiction but there was a functional flow that I would be able to test on the next day.
Day 5 I was testing the application. And this is where the feedback became extremely helpful for the final clean up phase of my design. The difference between the end product and the low-fidelity mockup is quite stark. This is due to the fact that after I had ran my tests, the users said they appreciated the approach but it was too many screens and in the end they still had to scroll through titles and choose something. Even though the results would have been more refined, it didn't feel much different than going through the main library and searching that way.
To incorporate this feedback I made a bold decision. This feature would be a quick search that would bring up a single title after completing the prompts. The title could be saved to their library but if a story was wanted that was facts about animals in the jungle, it was only 3 clicks away. A vastly different experience than the search function before.
Reflection:
This Design Sprint was a real challenge. But I feel like I was able to create something in the end I am proud of. My main hang up was the low-fidelity design. It was not as polished as I would have preferred. That being said, I was able to take the user feedback and clean up the UI in a way that I feel is original and really tackles the main goal of the persona. Let's get to a specific type of book quickly. I believe I was able to capture this result in the final product.
