TinyTales

UX/UI Designer for tablet app to help caretakers find stories to read aloud to their child(ren) in 5-day design sprint

Click here to interact with low-fidelity prototype

Role

UX Research
UI Design

Tools Used

Procreate
Marvel

Date

Jul 2022

Framework

GV Design Sprint

Overview

TinyTales is a new startup where parents can find books to read to their children. As children have grown their library, parents expressed it’s been difficult and time-consuming to find the right stories to read to their children.
TinyTales wants to make it easier for parents to find a great story to read to their children. They’ve brought me on board to run a design sprint to quickly test out a possible solution.

Research Highlights

Quotes

Persona

DESIGN SPRINT

Day 1: Understand and Map

The goal was the understand the challenge goals. The problem statement is clear—parents want to be able to find a book quickly according to the following preferences:

Length
Entertainment value
Educational value
Relevant to specific topics of interest
Age-appropriate reading level

As such, I’ve developed a user flow for how a TinyTales tablet app may look.

DESIGN SPRINT

Day 2: Sketch the Solution

Competitive Analysis

Initially, I explored a variety of children's book-reading apps, but noticed their design pattern to discover books were all very similar.

Left to right: Epic - Kids' Books & Reading, Vooks, Amazon Kids+

Lightning Demo

As such, I opted to quickly analyze three of the most popular entertainment apps (indirect competitors), rather than book-reading apps, for my lightning demo. The lightning demo is an exercise where I spend 30 minutes to find one feature from each of three apps to inspire TinyTales.

Left to right: Example 1: Netflix’s customized and varied home page curation would be an excellent application to a book-finding tool.Example 2: Pinterest uses a value-driven onboarding flow, which can help parents find personalized recommendations for books to read based on their favorite topics.Example 3: Kids Books Reading App Library has a great rewards system to incentive continued use of the app. Even though incentivization doesn’t directly address pain points, it can be a great product differentiator and encourage specific reading goals.

Crazy 8s Exercise

In order to ideate possible critical screens, I used Crazy 8s, an exercise that challenges people to sketch eight different ideas in eight minutes to brainstorm ideas for a critical screen. It is clear that the critical screen must be the dashboard from which parents can select books.

Then I generated a solution sketch (a three-panel board of the screen that comes before the critical screen, the critical screen itself, and the screen that comes after).

Left: Parents can select topics they and/or their child(ren) are interested in during the last step of the onboarding process. Middle: Critical screen comprised of different elements from Crazy 8s exercise.Right: Offering parents a democratic process to allow their child(ren) to choose a book for the day from previously curated selections can help parents with multiple children.

DESIGN SPRINT

Day 3: Decide and Create a Storyboard

I chose the following solution because it addresses the pain points expressed by most parents.

TinyTales: Storyboard

DESIGN SPRINT

Day 4: Prototype the Solution

The storyboard was then uploaded to Marvel as a low-fidelity prototype, connecting the individual UI components from my storyboard.

DESIGN SPRINT

Day 5: Validate

Usability Testing

With this interactive prototype, I conducted five user interviews to test usability. The key findings are as follows:

💡 Finding: Users wanted to see TinyTales' recommended books upfront, rather than what their social network was reading.

🛠️ Recommendation: De-prioritize social aspect of book discovery, unless you can connect with relevant groups such as your child's class or other same-aged social groups.

💡 Finding: Users were confused by the purposes of "Bookmark" and "Pause" functions of the reading page.

🛠️ Recommendation: Re-assess if "Bookmark" function would be used often and requires a brief tutorial, else remove. Remove "Pause" since users already assume that the page last read would be saved.

💡 Finding: "Democracy" tools allowing children to choose a book may not be needed, and parents don't want to manually select 2-3 books every night to allow child to pick.

🛠️ Recommendation: Provide an option to turn off or customize this tool, allowing parents to have 2-3 curated books randomly selected from a list, library, or topic.

Learnings

This project taught me to work efficiently on a short 5-day timeframe. It was nice to be given the research data and problem statement from the TinyTales startup. Parents clearly expressed their desires, which informed the features I designed: easy product discoverability by certain filters (ex: age and topic) and the option to share preferences.

The themes were easy to find, but I found in my interviews that there are likely many use cases that the business premise of TinyTales itself does not accommodate. It goes to show that cross-collaboration between product managers, marketing, and other stakeholders in a company is essential during any UX process.

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