Jessica Teng
Hangtight
UX Research
Hangtight
UX Research
Hangtight is a smart mobile app that quickly empowers people to go on meaningful hangouts with their friends.
Hangtight is a smart mobile app that quickly empowers people to go on meaningful hangouts with their friends.
Tinytales
Design Sprint
A Google Venture design sprint project to design a reading app for parents
and their young children
Challenges
This design sprint is based on a modified version of the Google Venture design sprint process, with research and background information provided by Springboard and Bitesize UX.
TinyTales has received feedback from parents indicating that it is challenging and time-consuming to find the right stories to read to their children from the company's extensive library. In response, TinyTales is seeking to create a solution to make it easier for parents to locate enjoyable stories to read to their children.
Timeline
5 days, Jun 2022
Role
Sole product designer
Tools
Figma
Photoshop
Illustrator
Google Doc
How Might We Questions
How might we help users spend less time finding books to read?
How might we organize books so that users can find them easily?
How might we categorize books that make sense to users?
Process
UNDERSTAND
SKETCH
DECIDE
PROTOTYPE
VALIDATE
UNDERSTAND
Design Constraint
The product should be an iPad or Tablet app
TinyTales has an inventory of stories written by contributing authors
The books should be discovered and read directly in the app
Target Users
The target users for this project are parents with young children under the age of 10 who are in the process of learning to read.
Some key highlights from user quotes include:
My kids are only a few years apart, but it makes a big difference when finding something they'll both like. It takes a long time to find a book they agree on...
- Margaret
Children: Mason (7 years old) & Alex (4 years old)
The main thing we look for is a specific topic that my daughter will like. Her interests change all the time though, so sometimes it takes a while to find the right story to read.
- Lindsey
Children: Macy (7 years old)
I talk to my friends who have children that are the same age as my sons...we usually trade recommendations and it works out great.
- Anthony
Children: David (7 years old) & Justin (5 years old)
Sometimes I like to find a story that is relevant to new experiences in my son's life. For example - he's going to a new school and I wanted to find some stories that could help him handle change, and feel comfortable meeting new people.
- Lauren
Children: Luke (5 years old)
I buy lots of books to read to my kids - I'm always scanning online reviews to see what other parents have to say. I read most of the reviews to see if their children are the same age as mine, and if they enjoyed the topic.
- Silvia
Children: Andrea (6 years old)
Persona
Map
To determine the most critical problem to solve, I mapped 5 end-to-end experiences that the users may have with the app. After careful consideration, I chose to focus on the experience of browsing through categories as it has the potential to address the identified problem most effectively.
SKETCH
Lightning Demos
Prior to commencing any design work, I thoroughly researched various existing solutions in the market and conducted lightning demos on 3 eBook competitors (Kindle, Epic!, Barnes & Noble Nook) to understand their approaches to similar problems. I also examined websites such as Amazon that excel in categorizing and recommending similar products. From each competitor, I identified the features that were most effective in addressing the problem at hand.
Clean and simple snapshot of a book's top info
Dynamic collections carousel
Helpful onboarding tips
Easy to browse collections carousel
Tile and list views
Big book covers for visual browsers
Reading level filters
Crazy 8s
Users need a faster and more organized method of locating the most popular books. This insight inspired me to design solution screens that focus on book collections.
8 solution screens
Through the 8 minute Crazy 8s exercise, I sketched 8 solution screens and selected one critical screen to sketch a three-panel-board of tiny storyboards.
three-panel-board storyboard
DECIDE
Storyboard
The onboarding screen will include input components to allow the user to specify their child's age and preferred topics. Ideally, the Home screen will seamlessly transition to the Collections page.
VALIDATE
User Interviews
I tested the Figma prototype with 5 users on Zoom. The users were given 3 main tasks:
Task 1
Go through the onboarding screens and input the age of their child and preferred topics.
Task 2
Look for a book in the "top picks" section without using the search function.
Task 3
Look for a book in the collections section without using the search function.
Test Results
Takeaways
-
The home page design should be crafted with the intention of providing a personalized and memorable reading experience for returning users.
-
For parents of young readers under the age of 10, it is more useful to categorize books by grade level rather than age, as this better aligns with their reading capabilities and curriculum.
-
User research has shown that when evaluating books, users tend to initially base their decisions on book covers and follow up with reading reviews. This should be considered in the design of the home page and the placement of book covers and reviews on the page.