Building Worlds, an Educational App
This project covered the research, concept and development of an Educational application to encourage 5-7 years-old children to practice the cursive writing using S-Pen
Challenge
To support a strategy to increase the use of S-Pen with the Samsung Tablets and Smartphones, we had been requested by Samsung Development Institute for Informatics to develop an educational application to encourage 5-7 years-old children to practice the cursive writing during the literacy phase. This app had been release with others for kids through the Kids Mode.
My Roles
apply research and interviews
conduct concept ideation
provide information architecture and interaction design documentation
follow up visual design and development activities
conduct guerrilla usability tests with 6 years-old children
The Process
Focusing in understand the educational needs of the application and explore possibilities, the hole team focused on desktop research to understand the needs and educational theories about the literacy phase.
Also I performed user research, interviewed parents and education specialists to spread the understanding from their perspectives and map kids needs and behaviors from their perspectives.
After the initial research, I exposed the main findings to the team (PO, Designers and Developers) and conducted ideation sections with them. Exploring the research findings, team creative ideas and technical possibilities, we reached the main concept of the solution based on the concept of encouraging the children to "guide" a train to construct new buildings in a variety of worlds.
Conducting ideation session with the team.
Based on this initial concept, I documented, following the client documentation guideline, all the rules and needs related to the solution to spread the knowledge we build as team internally to other teams that would work with us, such as teams at the clients, the sound designer, etc.
Wireframe documentation to share behavior and features with the client and the development team.
The documentation covered the basic rules of the game, the navigation through worlds and challenges, where the words could come from to support multiple languages, sound architecture, feedback and guidance points.
I had the effort of explaining the reason (found during the field research) for each step or design decision defined at the documentation so it would be clear for everyone in the project the scenario we were working with and the objective of each interaction.
Detailed snap of the wireframe documentation.
In a agile scenario, the visual design and software development had been initiated in parallel with this documentation, so we could update it with new insights during the process. I followed up this both process testing the deliverables, performing heuristic analysis and giving feedbacks according to the objective of the application.
Conducting usability tests with 6 years-old children.
When we had the first version that could be tested, with the support of colleagues with children with the studied age range, I conducted usability tests to verify if the application was as immersive as expected, how the kids interacted with the game and how they interacted with each other due to our game solution. Based on the tests and clients feedbacks too, we improved the solution until we had a version to be released to public using the Samsung Kids Mode platform.