​TinyTales

​TinyTales is a new startup that wants to help parents find great books and short stories to read to their young children.
Overview
My Role
TinyTales is an app-based service that provides stories to the parents to read to their young ones. The goal of the project was
to reduce the search time for the stories and deliver more relatable stories. The challenging part was to make the design usable for kids as well as adults.

I carried out design sprints to come up with an idea and to turn the idea into a prototype as quickly as possible. This prototype
was then tested on a set of users to determine the usability of this new design. 

I worked as the designer of this app to research, ideate, design 
and test the prototype design.
UX Designer

Research Synthesis (Primary Research, Heuristic
Analysis, Use Cases, Competitive Analysis);

Ideating (User Stories, Sketching, Mood Board);

Rapid Prototyping (User Flow, Wireframes, Hi-fi
Prototypes);

Testing (Usability Testing);
What is TinyTales?

TinyTales is an app-based platform where writers upload stories and the parents choose some stories to read for their children. Lately, TinyTales are expanding their library and it's getting difficult for them
to provide a better service to the customers.
What's the problem?

TinyTales have realized that the parents are spending more time finding stories to read to their kids than actually reading the stories. Parents are having a hard time finding stories when kids are being too specific and picky about their stories and if the kids belong to different age groups, it adds even more difficulties. ​
Frustrations:
  • Time Consumption
  • Finding Stories
  • Favorite Topics
  • Opinion
  • Quick Summary
Research and Understanding the user:
​
Insights:
  • Most parents choose books for the kid.
  • They are concerned about the length and the content of the book.
  • Kids have their preferences for books.
  • ​Parents like to have a bit of insight into the book before they start reading it to their kids.
  • Most of them read before going to sleep.
​Constrains:
  • The solution should be for the iPad or Tablet app.
  • TinyTales already have a large library.
  • They provide no hard books, it’s only a digital copy to read.
Fig: User Steps
Ideating​:
Lightning Demos
Various streaming and preference-based services like Amazon, Spotify, Audible, Kindle, Netflix, Prime Videos, etc. were selected for lightening demos. This task provided me a bunch of ideas for the app.
Competitive Analysis 
Crazy 8s
It is the quickest way to come up with new ideas and to get unstuck on the very first idea.
The most critical screen would be the selection screen where the user chooses from several covers. This screen could be the landing screen, or the screen right before reaching the landing screen. 
Crazy8 design sketches
Filtering the content after showing turned out to be a better approach than filtering the content ahead of time. This approach would help, in case the user doesn't know what he wants, or if the content presented happens to be what he wants, then it could save an additional step.

Design no 2 and 4 were very compelling and were able to satisfy most of the user goals. So, I decided to go ahead with a design which is a combination of both the design 2 and 4. ​​
Storyboarding:
​The first screen is the landing/ home page, where the user would see the latest uploads, recommendations, top-rated books, books from the same author, books similar to previous reads, etc.
The second screen is of different genres. This screen can be reached when the user taps on the genre on the home page. It has a filter for various genres the user could select from. ​
The third screen is the cover. When the user selects a book to read and it displays the details and information about the book.
Testing:

I tested this prototype with five participants. Three of those participants were young parents and one was a nanny and the other was a primary school teacher. 

Redesigning solution
Both the adults and children could use this app for bedtime stories so, I created the interface simple and straightforward. 

I placed the book choices right on the landing page, where the covers were displayed that are sorted along with various categories, as kids could be impatient and excited. 

Secondly, I provided an option to sort covers according to the genre, in case some kids or parents want to do so.

A favorite section was provided, in case the reader wants quick access to some books. Also, the Readlist function was provided to save certain books for future reads.
Prototype:

The app would be used in the dark so I chose to go with a dark theme that would not strain the eyes in the dark. 
For the texts, I selected white and green as the prominent color for the buttons. 
Usability test insights and changes
TinyTales App layout and architecture
Some of the quotes from the interview are listed below,
Netflix should have this genre feature.
Feels familiar to most of the apps I have used. Hardly need a second to figure out what’s going on.
I like that you have kept simple, I don’t have to worry about my kids messing things up by clicking everywhere.
I like it, nothing fancy, just the basic features I need and nothing too much crazy going on.
Learnings:

Running Design Sprints: This was the first Design Sprint I ever conducted. It was amazing to come up with a solution so quickly and to have it tested.

Storyboarding: Connecting different wireframes and presenting them with a story explaining the functioning of the app is a very interesting approach to the present solution. ​​

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