Proposed by Adobe + Scholastic Book Fairs Creative Jam, we were presented with the challenge to design a mobile tool to empower communities to host book-sharing events and introduce or increase access to new or used books to school-aged children. Over 7 days, in teams of two UI/UX designers we created Little Tales and placed 3rd among 400+ competitors across Canada, US and UK.
DURATION
1 week (Nov 2021)
What is Little Tales?
Little Tales is a mobile app that helps parents find book recommendations, host or attend book sharing events and get access to books at little to no cost. The app fosters a community of book-lovers to provide their children with the power of reading that every kid should have.
The Challenge
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has made attending/hosting book fairs and events difficult for parents and their kids to connect with other peers, safely, within the community.
Allow parents to find what their local community is doing
Provide a means of accessing books for lower-income families
Empower school-aged kids to read more & share the love of reading
We took to learning more about the book fair/book sharing experience and the sentiments around what makes it critical in a child’s development and learning.
We also talked to 4 people to get a better understanding of how they felt about their reading habits as a child and their own experiences of the fair.
The book sharing experience was empowering, magical and affordable. The pandemic has made it harder for children and their parents to discover new books with their own autonomy and join book communities.
Here's What We Did
We followed the design thinking model and worked our way through, revisiting stages of the model whenever we thought was necessary.
This helped us to make sure that we were always putting good UX first.
We wanted to have a better understanding of who we were really designing for and came up with a primary user as well as
a secondary user.
We also brainstormed more about how we wanted to handle the issue and use cases for how our app could help Sandra.
To narrow the scope of the project, we mapped out the flow of possible screens and features. When it came to designing them, we then divided and conquered.
We Sketched It Out
The Story Behind Little Tales
The branding of Little Tales was inspired by cozy nighttime stories, where parents read to their kids before tucking them in. We wanted a darker theme to replicate the feeling of a safe and magical space.
Judges' Feedback
The pitch couldn’t have gone worse in my mind - no matter how prepared I was I did not expect to get cut off by my own internet in the brief 3 minutes I had to present to a group of 500+ people.
Luckily, the Adobe team kept in contact with me to let me know next steps and after a short moment, I was able to pick up and finish the pitch successfully.
That being said... we placed 3rd!
The judges were understanding of our technical issue and we couldn’t be happier with the constructive feedback they gave us.
REFLECTION & LEARNINGS
While our goal included increasing reading access for children - they were not our target group.
Aside from my inevitable technical blimp during my pitch, the whole experience was a great way for me to really understand who we wanted to target as users, and who would indirectly benefit from it. Realistically, children of younger ages are not likely to have access or autonomy to use mobile phones which is why we wanted a parental figure in control of the app. Here’s are other learnings and some of our next steps:
Focus on the MVP; an issue we faced was wanting to do so much in so little time and there were things we wanted to include but couldn’t - for example in next steps I would have loved to flesh out the point/reward system of the app
Check for accessibility; as the judges brought up, the dark background created the mood we were going for but made it difficult to keep CTAs and cards accessible so we would have to reconsider this
Prepare for the worst case scenario; technical issues will happen and the best you can do is make sure that you’re prepared for that to have a good recovery
