Introduction
My role in this project was lead UX designer for TinyTales, a digital children's story app for the iPad and Tablet. My main objective was to synthesize the user research conducted by the UX research team to ideate solutions to some of the obstacles that TinyTales users were experiencing.
About TinyTales
TinyTales is a new startup where authors and illustrators upload children's books for parents to read to their children. They have an quite extensive library of short stories, illustrated books, educational stories and more. Stories are discovered and read in the app. TinyTales is 100% digital. There are no hard copies, or printing of the stories.
The Problem
As the Tiny Tales library of stories has grown, it has become increasingly difficult for parents to sift through the abundance of content to find a story relevant to their needs. TinyTales wants to make it easier for parents to find a great story to read.
Synthesizing The Research:
"Tell us about how you choose a book or story to read to your children"
From the research highlights I gleaned a few common themes which kept coming up in the interviews. Here are some of the pain points that users were facing:
- Not knowing what age range the books are written for.
- Not knowing the length of the books or how long it will take to read the book.
- Wanting to know if a story has any educational value or is purely for entertainment.
- Curiosity as to what other parents had to say about the story.
- Difficulty finding a story about a specific topic or experience.
Understanding the Problem
Having a better understanding of the pain points that users were experiencing, I mapped out a quick sketch of a users end-to-end experience of a possible solution for the TinyTales app. Users were having the most trouble sifting through the content within the app so the search function filters and how search results were displayed were going to be the most important screens to focus on.
Competitor Research
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More information was needed about what search preferences that users were going to input to help them discover new and exciting books to read. I needed to research what others were doing for similar problem spaces for inspiration on my designs.
I started with iStock by Getty Images. They are superb at the technique of locating specificity in their endless mass of graphics. One thing that jumped out to me was how they divide content into tabs for the 3 different volumes of; PHOTOS, ILLUSTRATIONS, & VIDEOS that are easy to toggle through. Some other areas of inspiration for my TinyTales design were the iPad app, epic!, the Kindle app, and kidsbooks.com epic! was helpful sifting through search results by displaying the age range and reading time for each book. The Kindle app focused more on the 5-star rating that each book received from users along with user reviews. Kidsbooks.com separated their library of books into a copious array of categories, subjects and search filters. 
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Drawing a Solution
Now that I had a bit of inspiration it was time to start setting ideas to paper by sketching out possible solutions on paper. I went with the Crazy 8's approach by drawing the first 8 ideas that came to mind.
Sketching the Solution
Now that I had a clear path in mind I started storyboarding sketches of what each screen would look like for the user journey of finding a book to read.
Preparing for Digital Prototype
I didn't want to overwhelm users with too many search options. My goal was to keep it as simple as possible. I decided I wanted to display a few of the key filters that focused on age range and book length since these were the two things that kept coming up in the interviews. I wanted these filters to be set without having to pull up the digital keyboard because that can be intrusive to the user experience. I determined that a seamless way to set these parameters is with a slider bar. Creating the data input for age range was pretty straightforward. Determining what users were looking for in book length was a little trickier. For children's stories, number of pages can be pretty ambiguous and word count is not a measurable that most people can grasp. I felt the most universally understood parameter would be to use reading time counted in minutes for displaying book length.
I didn't want to stress users out by cluttering the page with categories and subjects so I decided that the way to find books about a particular topic or experience was going to be through using the search function.
Once the results were shown they could be divided into the 2 main book categories of fiction and nonfiction. Since many parents interviewed said they wanted stories that had some educational value or a lesson, I
Once the results were shown they could be divided into the 2 main book categories of fiction and nonfiction. Since many parents interviewed said they wanted stories that had some educational value or a lesson, I
Usability Tests Using Clickable Prototype
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I then used the Sketch to create some rough digital screens and prototyped them using the inVision app. Next I recruited 5 participants for interviewing and usability testing. For the test script I gave users a fictional scenario and a few simple tasks. Starting at the home page, I asked them to think out loud as they explored the app completing each task while I took notes and in some cases recorded.
Task #1: They wanted to find a bedtime story to read to their 2 children who were 4 & 6 years old. How would they navigate the app to find a story that they could read suitable for both children. Task #2: They had about 15 minutes (give or take a few minutes) before bedtime to read the story. What would you do next? Task #3: One of the children tells them they were learning about Monkeys at school and then it became unanimous that both children wanted to read a book about Monkeys! What would you do next? Task #4: You being a good parent (after finding books about monkeys) wanted to narrow down the search even more and pick one that would teach them something or have a lesson of some sort and wasn't purely just for entertainment value. What would you do next? |
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Results from the Prototype Testing
Of the users who tested the prototype, four of them were parents of 2 children, and one of the participants had 3 children. This was perfect, demographic wise.
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Observation: 3 of the 5 participants didn't notice the search filters at all when beginning the tasks. They immediately started trying to swipe through the carousels and search for a story that way. After I told them the carousel was not functional they admitted that they would have just kept swiping until they found something that they liked. 2 of the users did use the search filter sliders with no trouble. They both said the filters were helpful.
Recommendation: Since not all users were able to locate the filters I need to make sure of their relevancy or make them stand out better. Another option to test is asking for the ages of children during the onboarding process so that they are preset when the user first arrives at the home page. Observation: All 5 people mentioned they really liked the small information block and 5-star ratings below each story cover. Recommendation: Add book title since some names are illegible in thumbnail view. Observation: When tasked with finding a book about monkeys, all 5 participants used the search bar at the top of the page. Observation: As far as finding a book that had some type of learning experience or a lesson, 4 out of 5 toggled between the Fiction, Nonfiction, and Educational tabs. One participant was confused about the difference between Nonfiction and Educational. I explained that the Educational could be a fictional story about Monkeys, but still contained a learning experience. Recommendation: "Educational" is too ambiguous. Maybe change this tab to "Educational Stories" and test again. |
