Mobile App: Little U

Role: UX Researcher, Designer, Prototyping
Team: Collaboration with 3 team members
Timeline: 2 weeks

Our Goals

1. Empower families of various cultural backgrounds to engage in story time using a recently learned language

2. Create a fun and motivating method for children to learn a new language

Summary

Little U is a design that was created for my UX/UI program. Little U is an interactive story time app, originally aimed to help immigrant children and parents participate in story time, while enhancing their English skills. As we progressed with design, we iterated the app to be a more general language-learning story time app, with a variety of language options.

Research

We administered surveys and conducted user interviews on caregivers, young adults and immigrant parents to better understand:

1. The benefits of story time for children and their caregivers

2. Which stories are favored and for what reason

3. Language learning priorities

4. Reading materials accessibility

5. Whether mobile apps are recommended for education purposes

Using the information gathered, we created an affinity map. The main takeaways were that:

1. Story time is an extreme bonding experience for caregivers and children

2. Learning another language through stories is incredibly motivating

3. People desire more cultural representation in children stories

4. Apps can be a great asset in modern learning, especially for children

We then took this information and created two user personas to help us visualize and target their needs:

• Linda, a mom of twins who has recently immigrated her family from Colombia to the U.S. and aspires for her children to become fluent readers and conversationalists in English.

• 7 year old twins Anthony and Maria, who want to spend more time with their mom and improve their English so they feel confident reading in front of their peers.

User Flow Summary

• Showcase our app’s features and values during on-boarding

• Request users’ goals and language preferences immediately

• Prioritize the app’s usability as simple and intuitive in every screen

• Emphasize interactivity and positive encouragement throughout story time

For inspiration, our team looked at children’s reading and meditation bedtime apps. Here we’ve pointed out some aspects we loved. 

Below is a sample of our style guide and illustration set. We kept it fun, vibrant, yet modern! All Illustrations are original creations by members of the team.

Lo-fidelity Wireframes

Originally we planned on designing our app for landscape orientation, but we quickly learned that the layout was too limiting.

Mid-fidelity Wireframes

As our designs progressed we conducted a re-evaluation within our team and redlined necessary iterations for the hi-fidelity mock-ups. Some of these iterations included font choice, overwhelming illustrations and ambiguous reward systems.

Hi-fidelity Mock-ups

The jump from mid-fidelity wireframes to hi-fidelity mock-ups was quite significant. Although landscape orientation was too limiting for the main pages of the app, we decided that it would be ideal for the stories themselves. In addition to the iterations from the previous section, we also iterated based off the impactful results of our user testing.

User Testing Key Insights:

• Translation icon meaning on home was confusing

• Unclear that “Your Bookshelf” was clickable

• User was unaware that the book categories were scrollable

• User was unclear about the purpose of on-boarding choices

Iterations Based Off User Testing:

• Moved the translation option to the book selection section

• Made “Your Bookshelf” a tab toggle

• Ensured the category icons showcased a partial preview

• Multiple selection context change + updated user flow