Introduction

Context:

As a parent, it is important to read to your children for them to be ahead in school and in life. TinyTales is a platform that has a compilation of children stories by different authors and illustrators. What stories they offer range from short illustrated stories to more educational ones.

The Problem:

Parents have found it difficult and time consuming to find the right stories to read to their kids. 

The Solution:

I created a design in which the length and the stories/books can be categorized in such a way that they don’t have to click on too many things to get the information that they need. 

Designer Role:

My role in this project is to create a prototype that can effectively show that the solution that has been stated is proven to be the right direction. 

Day 1: MAP

The biggest insight that was found was that parents value their child’s enjoyment and education from stories along with the flexibility of a long or short story.

I created a user flow that started and ended with the two most important factors when parents are looking for stories to read; the who (who is the parent) and the end goal (to find a story that parent and child can read together).

Day 2: SKETCH

Step 1: Lightning Demo

Step 2: Crazy 8s

Step 3: The Solution Sketch

Day 3: DECIDE

Storyboarding

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I had changed up the user map from Monday with having the topic be first and then the parents can choose if they want a long or short story from the search results. I started them on a home page where they could go wherever they wanted to go and then led them to the topics page so they could choose what they wanted. One thing I know I wanted to incorporate was a parents list and what the kids would pick. Knowing that the last thing would be ultimately the kid’s choice. 

Day 4: PROTOTYPE

With this prototype, it made me focus on the problem at hand and not the little things that everyone wants to do. It did get to the point where I just wanted something to be on the screen to represent what I was looking for like the book covers. 

My goals for testing this prototype were to know where people are going to go first when they are wanting to search for things. Do I need to have something in the search bar? Are people going to add books to a list? Does the flow make sense?

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Day 5: TEST

I interviewed 4 people who work with kids and have nieces and nephews. And interviewed one person who had two sons. Since the prototype was so short I only had them do one task and that was to find a short story. 

On the home page, some of them tried to click on the search bar, some tried to click on short stories and others tried to click on the books that were already on the page. I originally had wanted users to add books to a list but not many users did that. Out of the five, only one actually clicked on “add to list” underneath the book. 

There were some quick fix mistakes when testing. The back button on the last page was the one with the most usability problems because it didn’t work. Most of them said to add the kids’ picks to the front page and to add the ham toggle to each page that has it. 

Conclusion

When I started this design sprint, I was super excited to create a better experience for reading to kids. I knew that I wanted to make the UI very kid friendly while keeping all the small information that parents want to have. 

I felt very proud when I was working on the sketches for the UI. My only complaint is that I didn’t have enough time to focus on the UI design because this was a sprint. But I did learn how to keep my focus on the main aspect of the problem that I was trying to solve. 

In the end after testing, I realized that the problem was really simple to solve. It didn’t need to be overly complex because what my users want is really simple; to save time. And with saving time, they can create a better experience for their children.