Background

A business known as Global-Corp has recently taken a charitable initiative to help more children learn history. To accomplish this goal Global-Corp has donated a smartphone to every child within a given school, and equipped the smartphone with a time traveling app.

The Challenge

Design an app to facilitate hands-on learning for children aged 10-12 by allowing them to travel through time and space.

Tools Used

• Adobe Illustrator CC

• Adobe Photoshop CC

• Adobe XD CC

• Adobe Color CC

• UXPressia

• Wires UI Kit

• Stock Illustration, Photos & Icons

• Pencils, Pens & Paper

Ok, first things first. Who are we designing for?

Time was limited for this project, but lucky for me I have a few great 10-12 year olds in my inner-circle. I was able to profile them, and came up with a persona to help me gauge the needs of my mobile app. 

Based on my "Sarah" persona, I determined some important factors for this student demographic:

• In the internet age, kids have so many different ways available to them to receive knowledge.

• The fast-paced "media blitz" that surrounds them impacts their ability to spend long timeframes focused on singular subjects through singular delivery methods.

• Quick gratification is the way to go.

• Gamification is a great tool to keep their focus. It fosters competition and provides them a positive emotional boost.

• Social connectivity is everything. They want to remain connected to friends and their social network as often as possible.

This information was key in helping me prioritize features and interface components. 

Kings & Queens

This is a richly-styled app, which is focused on teaching students about famous monarchs. It provides a deep-dive into European royal bloodlines and relies on photo-heavy content.

Pros

• In-depth information within historical domain

• Intuitive browsing workflow fosters exploration

• Timeline-based content layout provides context to users

Cons

• Age-inappropriate UI styling plays to an older crowd

• Content is too specific, focused solely on medieval monarchies

HistoMaster UK

This one is a quiz game, which provides a quick entrance into UK history. It allows the user to answer a handful of questions each day for free before requiring an app purchase.

GCSE History

This app provides English students with a study guide to help them learn specified subject material. The purpose of this workflow is to help them pass a mandatory test.

Pros

• Interface is fun, clean and easy to use

• Custom quizzes to prepare students for a greater challenge

Cons

• Rigid quiz workflow and content prohibits exploration

• App adoption is short-lived, and ends when test is passed

As I do with any new project, I spend a decent chunk of time at the very beginning simply letting the ideas flow. I write them down or type them out to record them. In this case, I used Microsoft Word, but I have had equal success with post-its, or even on a napkin in a restaurant.

When recording ideation notes, I like to keep the descriptions very short and high-level. I love the process of rapid ideation, and always feel a sense of excitement allowing myself to jump between ideas. I do my best to not self-edit during this stage, and allow myself the time to think outside of the box.

The more I thought through the unique challenges for this product, and the demographic it serves, the more I realized how difficult adoption would be for pre-teens. They are constantly flooded with rapidly changing media, and attention spans don't last long at that age. The only way to keep them truly engaged would be to match this experience to the ones that they choose to engage in every day.

I decided to create a wide variety of ways for the user of this application to access all types of educational material. People have preferences for methods to find information anyways, but in this case I thought I could also reduce boredom by giving the student users a constant, rapidly-changing method of accessing new information. 

I made the choice to include various methods of searching and browsing for material, as well as cognitive suggestions based on user behavior.

To go one step further, I also included a gamification component to play into competitor/collector personality types. I included a challenge feature, which would offer digital badges as prizes for challenge completion. Users can collect badges and compete against each other. Teachers would also have integrations into the enterprise features for this app, to build quizzes and tie app content to state-mandated curriculums. 

By the time I got to wireframing, my brain was exploding with ideas. I love the wireframing stage, because it allows me to validate the ideas in my head. That said, it can sometimes be a little time-consuming. I didn't want to lose the energy that I felt during the ideation stage.

To keep my momentum up, I looked to pre-made wireframing kits to do the tedious details for me. I found the Adobe Wires kit for Adobe XD CC, and it was an easy fit. I used the building blocks from the kit to accomplish the first 80% of the wireframing process.

The remaining components were simply easy modifications of existing symbols or quick new symbol creation. All-in-all, the wireframe design stage was a great experience and an efficient process.

I wanted to create a vibrant, colorful, visually stimulating interface for this product. Based on the Sarah persona I hypothesized that the student users would not only prefer a highly-colorful interface, but would actually need one. One of the largest pain points of traditional history lessons is that they can be boring and long-winded, especially for kids of the digital age.

I wanted to create an interface with contrasting colors, and constantly changing palettes with each page. This sort of an experience would be jarring to many adults, but would fit in well amongst the onslaught of rapidly-changing media that 10-12 year olds voluntarily consume all day long.