Tiny Tales

“TinyTales” is a one-person Design Sprint exercise scenario created by Bitesize UX. While this modified version follows most of the critical steps of the original GV Design Sprint, Bitesize UX has provided a kickstart kit including the project brief, initial research highlights, persona, and an interview video with a user.

Parents of young children strongly believe in the importance of reading to fuel children’s imagination and learning but are having a hard time finding great stories to read to their children that are fun, educational, and age-appropriate. They also end up spending a long time searching and wish that there was a quicker and easier way.

TinyTales is an app with a library of author-submitted children's stories geared towards parents who want to read aloud to their young children (approx. 4-9-year-old). TinyTales app allows you to browse recommendations of top-rated stories based on your child’s previous favorites to help you find the perfect stories to read to your children.

These are the problem statements I came up with to focus on based on insights from user interviews:

Below is a user map of a possible scenario.

I reviewed several different existing apps of primary and secondary competitors and made quick sketches of some of the screens/ideas that I liked.

I sketched different variations of my most critical screens - the home page & the book summary page.

I used the ideas from the crazy 8s sketches to come up with a solution sketch - a three-panel board that is kind of like a tiny storyboard. Focusing on the persona's desire to find great stories to read to her children quickly and easily, I decided on the below screens for the home page and book summary page.

Focusing on the 3-panel solution sketch from yesterday, I added additional screens to the solution sketch to create a storyboard for my persona, Claire. It’s bedtime and Claire wants to read a story to James and Kayla. It’s James’ turn to choose a book first.

I tried 3 iterations of the UI before deciding to proceed with version 3. Using dark colors on the background make the screen look too heavy and serious, so I changed it to be brighter to not feel so serious. I also created the logo & illustrations for the user profiles.

I was able to recruit 5 people with children ages 2-10 to test the prototype remotely via Skype. The usability sessions lasted 20-30 minutes long. They were given the the task - Find a dinosaur book to read with James​​​​​​​

Results:

All participants completed the task & thought the app is easy to use

Many participants mentioned that they liked the clean look of the app

See below for key findings from usability testing

“When I’m looking at kids' books, it looks great, but when I open it up there are too many words for my kid. Is there a feature where you can see 2-3 pages of the book to get a sense of whether it’s appropriate for my kid?”

After the 5-day Design Sprint was over, I came back to it on day 6 and made some of the changes based on the findings from the usability tests.

The changes I made include:

Added preview photos of the book on Book Summary page

Added 'Read It Again' section on Home Page

Minor design and copy change

After iterating the prototype, I felt that it would be very useful for parents to also have a mobile version of the app, to be able to read to their children on-the-go. Based on user feedback, I decided to add in "Continue Reading" section to the main page so that the parents could easily find the stories that they were reading with their children. Even though there was a limitation in space, I tried to keep the experience consistent for the user by keeping as many of the elements and designs similar to the iPad app.

Following the Google Ventures Design Sprint process helped me learn how to find new solutions quickly and efficiently & helped me learn new tools such as Lightning Demo, Solution Sketching, and Storyboarding. It was fun to see how quickly ideas can evolve into a prototype when you are able to focus on one step of the process each day. I also enjoyed talking to parents about their family’s reading times and how special that time together is for them, and learned so much from the feedback I got from usability testing.