Learning Through Art

Books Alive! For Kids MVP App

Promoting literacy, social-emotional learning, and family connection through interactive reading experiences that feature Learning Through Art’s award-winning media

My Role:
Lead Designer

The Team:
1 Design Manager
1 UX Designer (me)
1 UX Researcher
2 Operations Managers
2 Developers

Year
2021 

Learning Through Art: Books Alive! For Kids

Learning Through Art (LTA) is a Cincinnati-based nonprofit that provides programming in support of the arts, literacy, and community engagement.

LTA wanted to create a new iPad app to complement their existing literacy program, Books Alive! For Kids. Their vision for the app would leverage their regional EMMY-award winning content and in-person programming to expand literacy among 4-9 year olds.

As the lead designer, I collaborated with our research team and LTA’s Operations and Development partners to define key workflows, interactions, and ways to translate their visual language to a digital medium in a way that was usable and engaging.

Project Overview:

Problem

The app needed to engage children across widely varying developmental and literacy levels, as well as adults in their lives, to create a communal love of reading.

The team also needed to measure the MVP’s impact on its audience according to yet-to-be-defined engagement markers.

Process

Using LTA’s vision for the app as a guideline, we:

  • Conducted team brainstorming and sketching sessions

  • Collaborated with iOS developers and Multimedia Producers to define how the app might augment existing content

  • Defined engagement markers and outlined a research plan for the LTA team.

  • Synthesized raw data from 28 in-person sessions collected by the LTA team

Impact

  • 94% of children met or exceeded our engagement metrics.

  • 77% of children successfully navigated the app without assistance from an adult.

  • MVP testing validated that an interactive reading app could foster family bonding

  • The MVP helped the team secure an additional $15,000 in funding for continued expansion and development of the app.

Problem

How do we make the content LTA already has interactive, with an experience that’s universally
child-friendly?

The Learning Through Art team came to us with a vision for the app, but needed a UX team to make sure their vision could be usable and valuable.

Their vision used a children’s book as the vehicle for themed in-person and digital activities, such as crafts, word hunts, performances, and more to combine learning to read with opportunities for social-emotional development.

Children would unlock new activities or snippets for a book in the app as they progress through the book’s in-app journey, either by completing reading snippets or finishing an activity that relates to the themes and takeaways from the story.

Mapping the experience through multiple rapid rounds of sketching and concepting

Process

After a brief benchmarking and academic research period to understand best practices in designing for young children, we spent three weeks rapidly iterating on the overall experience at low and medium fidelities.

After presenting concepts to LTAs Program Managers and child experts, we aligned on a user flow that reflected the in-person literacy journey while minimizing any complexity and abstraction that might confuse and disengage their youngest learners.

Exploring and recommending a UI style that harmonized with their existing visual language

After defining the overall flow and child’s journey through the app, we spent two weeks focusing on “look and feel”, using the main “bookshelf” navigation as a starting point.

This was an opportunity for me to leverage my background in illustration and fine art to explore experiences that fit the team’s existing whimsical, semi-skeuomorphic style. Our eventual recommendation was handed off to the team for their in-house illustrator to execute and expand on.

Collaborating with Media Producers and iOS Developers to define an execution for mini-games and themed activities

The main journey through the app weaved together LTA’s content with question-response-style interactivity similar to what is seen in children’s TV shows. To execute this seamlessly, we needed to collaborate with Developers and Content producers to create a flexible design system that would accommodate all of their content, past and future.

Our solution not only needed to feel like a seamless conversation between the reader and the content presenter, but it also needed to:

  • Work offline, or in spotty connections

  • Function on smaller devices with slower loading times

  • Allow children to stop progress and start later without consequence

Defining engagement markers and documenting a plan for research and validation

Openfield collaborated with LTA’s in-house psychologist to come up with 6 markers for engagement, including both hard and soft metrics.

We then defined a research plan and documented it for the Learning Through Art team to facilitate throughout 28 in-home sessions. After research was conducted, we compiled the responses from the LTA team and synthesized the results

The MVP test was a success, with 94% of the children tested meeting our engagement markers.

Impact

77% of the children we tested with were able to navigate the app without adult assistance. Younger cohorts had a slightly harder time navigating the app, so more research and iteration was recommended by our team to fill the gap.

In 2023, the MVP helped the Learning Through Art team secure an additional $15,000 in funding from Artswave, a Cincinnati-area arts organization.

The grant will fund continued expansion and development of the app and programming in Cincinnati Public Schools and other local school districts.

Reflection

This project, completed in 2021, was my first time leading a project start to finish. I have taken lessons from this engagement to initiatives that I’ve led since, including:

  • The importance of aligning with the Project Management and Development teams early and often, particularly in tight timelines.

  • Knowing what fidelity to to work in given the project constraints, goals, and place in the process.

  • Aligning on a clear definition of “done”