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Once upon a time is a one-stop app where you can find a great collection of stories for your child and gives you the best storytelling experience
Contribution
Product strategy, User research & Analysis, Persona creation, Value proposition, market analysis, Story board, information architecture, user flow Wireframes, UI Design & , Usability Testing
Target audience
Parents of kids between the age of 0-8
Duration
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(Oct 2021 -Nov 2021)
ONCE UPON A
TIME
Designing a new way of story telling
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PROCESS
That’s how it began!
1
Problem
2
Opportunity
3
Solution
Problem
Parents find it difficult to tell good moral stories to their kids
Children love stories
At any point, at any time, stories simply have the power to flip any situation for the better
Is your child not eating? , Is your child bored sitting at home while it’s pouring outside?
Want to calm your child during a tantrum?
Tell them a story and it’ll do the trick!
Without stories, children miss out on a lot of developmental milestones.
BUILDING ONCE UPON A TIME
What i did and what i learned
I adopted a design thinking process for approaching the problem
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Research
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Persona
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Empathy map
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User journey map
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Problem statement
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Value proposition
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Competitive analysis
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Story board
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information architecture
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User flow
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Wireframe
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Low-fidelity
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High-fidelity
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Research plan
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Usability test
Secondary
Primary
Conducted a survey to gain insight to understand how users experience this problem and understand their pain points.
Conducted a secondary research and developed insights from them
180
User survey
6
Interviews
10
Questions
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51%
35%
62%
83%
Parents want their children to listen to the stories along with parents
Parents wants to explain the stories to their children after hearing the gist of the story.
Children wants to hear stories more during bedtime
Parents would like to have an app that helps them to tell stories to their kid.
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Do you use any other media for storytelling to kids?
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Can you describe your current work situation and how you take care of your child's storytelling needs?
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What challenges do you face while telling stories to your child?
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Is there any way in which you feel these challenges can be resolved?
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How do you prefer to explain a story to a kid?
Held 5 interviews with parents of children between the age of 0-8 to obtain in-depth qualitative responses regarding the key aspects of the prompt.
" I find it difficult to manage my childs story telling needs, i always run out of stories"
- Veena
From interview
Interview
Insights
1
Users found it very difficult to tell stories to their kids and are really anxious about running out of stories
2
It is better to categorize the stories according to age because children have different attention spans
3
children want stories during different times of the day it’s better to add categories based on a routine like breakfast tales, bedtime tales, travel tales, etc.
Meet Sajila & other parents
Consolidating the research & interviews, I created a narrative journey that centers around a parent, Sajila, The goal was to better understand this experience and pin-point potential pain points / opportunities for design.
Sajila
Developed an empathy map identifying and consolidating the thoughts, feelings, and traits of all the users
Arun
Vidya
Parvathy
Veena
Pain points
1
Discovery
Busy Parents have trouble in telling good stories to their children
2
Time
Don’t have time to browse though stories online and select stories from a lot
3
Confused
Users have no visibility to good moral stories. They have to view each story individually to find the best for their childs age
4
Access
The user has limited access to good stories and to keep their children engaged and have their time
User journey map
I mapped out the users’ steps to see how I could simplify their journey to help them reach their most important goals with the product.
Thinks about old stories which was read long back
THINKS
Anxious if a right moral story can be found for a 3 year old
Develop a collection of good stories suitable for every age
Browses stories in internet
SEARCH
Frustrated beacuse doesnt have time to go through every story and find the best
Categorize stories and help select the best for your child
Selects random stories
UNDERSTAND
Confused about the content of the story
Gave a gist of the story so the paretn gets an idea before child hears the story
Tells stories to the kids
TELL
Anxious because doesnt know if the child is enjoyingthe story, child is repeatedly asking questions
Give opportunity for child to interact along with the story
Competitive analysis
Conducted a competitive analysis analyzing the products of competitors who offer similar products which gave us a well-rounded foundation about the market the product will enter.
identified direct and indirect competitors.
Value proposition
Thought about the basic features the product can provide and developed a value proposition of the product
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Storytel
Kinderling
Goal statement
Our once upon a time will let users hear stories for different age groups which will affect the growth of children positively and reduce the stress of parents by allowing users to play audio stories during different times of the day. we will measure the effectiveness by retention and engagement of users, No of subscribed users (KPI)
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Site map
Based on the opportunity areas I summarized, I defined the storytelling app's product structure.
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Low fidelity wireframe
Before conducting the usability study, developed the research questions, methodology, key performance indicators, and prompts for the study . View research study
Conducted an unmoderated usability study with 5 participants and recorded the obseravtions. Identified patterns and themes from observations and developed the insights
Insights
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Users need better terms like play trial instead of play sample
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Users don't need a lot of features, minimal features are better
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Selecting age before entering the homepage makes things customizable, but users will just follow only that type of story and won't explore. So selecting age after entering the homepage is preferable
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Position the subscription button such that it's easily recognizable and prominent
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Adding the genre to the story would be great
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Users felt Sign up page is too much crowded
After the usability testing from the insights achieved made changes to the prototype
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Problem: Users felt the mark as completed button as unnecessary. Users once completed hearing the story would prefer to remove the story from favorites once completed. People don't need both the options
Solution: removed the mark as completed from the options
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Problem: The subscription button is not easily recognizable and prominent
Solution: I Positioned the subscription button such that it's easily recognizable and prominent
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Selecting age before entering the homepage makes things customizable, but users will just follow only that type of story and won't explore. So selecting age after entering the homepage is preferable
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Users need better terms instead of a play sample. The elements in the bottom were placed in a single line, not scalable. so divided it into two lines. Added genre to the story
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Problem : Users felt sign up page is very crowded. It included a gist about the product and sign up options.
Solution: Separated the gist and sign up options into different pages for reducing congestion.
VISUAL DESIGN
WHY ONCE UPON A TIME?
The first thing that comes into everybody's mind when they hear about stories is the usage "once upon a time".
They are words worth honoring and passing down the generations. They deliver a special magic to children everywhere – the familiar and the fantastic . So, when it comes to overused words in children’s literature, I think “Once upon a time” should earn a special mention – a free pass to the world of fairy tales!
This combination is selected because of this modern and sophisticated look.
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Logo is derived from the idea of audio story and the name . The colors where choose based on the main colors of the application
Optimized for print, web, and mobile interfaces, and has excellent legibility characteristics in its letterforms.
Sans is preferable for young children, or anyone just learning to read. Sans is also good for readers with certain visual impairments.
Headline 1
Font
Open sans
Weight
Regular
Size
20px
Headline 2
Font
Open sans
Weight
Bold
Size
20px
Headline 3
Font
Open sans
Weight
Regular
Size
20px
Headline 4
Font
Open sans
Weight
Bold
Size
16px
Subtitle 1
Font
Open sans
Weight
Regular
Size
16px
Subtitle 2
Font
Open sans
Weight
Bold
Size
14px
Body 1
Font
Open sans
Weight
Regular
Size
12px
Caption
Font
Open sans
Weight
Regular
Size
10px
User onboarding :
A short introduction to the application
Onboarding provides the user with an introduction to the storytelling app, increasing the user's retention in the application, user can also skip if they are not interested and directly get started.
Gist of the product
Login
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To avoid loading time and sidetracking users with redundant visual elements I used a clean and simple design
Once the user completes the onboarding, they are presented with a login screen connecting them to the home screen
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social media logins will simplify log in which will make them much more willing to use your product
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email login is secondary login because users find it difficult to login with social media due to privacy reasons
HOMEPAGE
All the main features are on the main screen and all details are clear in a single scroll
Recommendations change according to the time of the day
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Stories are categorized by morals, age and routine
Favourite stories can be saved for future references
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Search provides a lot of categories of stories. user can either select from categories or search by name
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Accounts deals with all settings related to app and user
CATEGORY
SEARCH
FAVOURITES
ACCOUNT
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STORY TELLING
Stories are the main element in the application. stories are divided as free stories and premium stories. User can preview the story and subscribe if they want to hear the story
FREE STORY
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PREMIUM STORY
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binary system to reduce the cognitive load for users and better for predictive content personalization
Gist of the story to read the content if necessary before listening to the content
Similar stories are shown because user would be interested in similar types of content
SUBSCRIPTION
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The product was designed considering accessibility and the importance of inclusive design so that the solution become accessible to all types of users around
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Dark mode and light mode options are given which can be switched easily considering the conditions of the user
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Provided usable focus states. helps people know which element is selected and understand where they are when navigating.
Important information are not shown by color alone. Used a combination of text and color.
Labels are placed on top so that it should never completely go away when the focus is inside of an input.
Added a line on top of the navigation bar icons to understand which page they are browsing in
The color contrast ratio was checked and the colors are in contrast with each other and satisfy the WCAG conditions
Learnings
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Research is a must - Research is the key towards a good design. it forms the foundation of your product. good research develops a good product. The research revealed unexpected information and made it possible to adapt the product to users’ needs.
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Keep your users first- Conducting user testing and evaluating users feedback at various stages helped me to discover and eliminate pain point at early stages.
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Avoid biases- What you think users want is not what users really want
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Building a design system : Learning to construct a design system saved me a ton of time and made it easier to maintain consistency.
Future steps
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Build a community to connect parents and children. Parents can upload pictures or videos of their children's activities. They can share like and comment, have active discussions, its like a social media platform just for parents and kids
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Provide contents for parents as well about parenting
