Brief overview of the entire project
Sensory education is believed to be crucial in human’s early age. However, the sensory of touch is easily ignored.
How can we improve kids sensory of touch in a interactive way with technology?
Sensory education is believed to be crucial in human’s early age. However, the sensory of touch is easily ignored.
How can we improve kids sensory of touch in a interactive way with technology?
How did I get to the solution?
Understand the problem
To understand this design space, I used the how might we activity to brainstrom some possible solutions which could solve the problem.
Targeting the direct users who are affected by the problem space
From the secondary research, I determined children of what age would be the target user by analyzing their behaviors, emotion and cognition stage, and so on.
Digging deeper to understand the pain points
After confirming the target user group, I had an user interview with children and create user persona to find out the pain points.
Brandy Yang
A 3-year-old boy lives with his parents and sisters in Boston.
A Kindergarten pupil but due to the pandemics, he spends most of his time at home having online classes with the company of his mother.
Wants and Needs
He wants more company from his mother especially wants his mother to be more concentrated while playing toys with him instead of keep swiping her phone.
He loves to play toys and do role play with them.
When having role play with toys, he’d like to create a playing scenario with the toy. However, he is not good at storytelling and can’t explain the scenario to his mom.
Learning more about what can I do from the touch points
I created a user journey map based on the user flow when a kids play a game on mobile phone to figure out the touch points in their user experience.
Use physical toy bricks made of different materials and textures to arouse sense of touch.
Kids can use physical toys as clues to explore a gamified app.
Let storytelling as a main clue of the game that helps improve kids' expression skills as well as involves parents into the playing process.
Observing the relationship between materials and feelings for toy bricks design
Since I decided to make physical toy bricks to pair with the gamified app, I needed to figure out what materials and textures can give certain experience to users. So I did an observation experiment to achieve this goal.
Steps for the experiment
1. Every user is asked to close their eyes and touch balls that made of different materials to feel each ball’s texture.
2. I was supposed to observed and marked down their facial expression when they touch the balls.
3. Then I ask them what they are thinking of when they are touching.
Based on the result of the experiment, I designed a set of toy bricks that represent different feelings, which might served as clues in the gamified app.
1. Different materials deliver different feelings to children.
2. Different materials also deliver various feelings. Metal is more “icy” than plastic because it feels harder and colder.
3. When opening their eyes, children feel “colder” or “warmer” depending on the surface color of the toy.
Considered how to combine physical toy bricks with the virtual gamified app
Toy Bricks
I sketched out some ideas to solve the identified problems to visualize and map out the user flow.
Storytelling Game
Kids can use physical toy bricks to generate character in the app to play the game. In the process of storytelling, kids as well as parents are encouraged to explore more of their feelings by touching different bricks as a part of the game.
According to the user flow, I designed the low fidelity prototype to accommodate problems
After the user testing, I gathered some feedbacks that helped me better accommodate the problem and did the iteration to improve the product
Since the target users are kids, the onboarding and instruction of how to play the game must be easy to understand, better steps by steps with illustration.
The initial wireframe lacked of a standard design of functional pages like setting page and reward page, which might lead to some inconvenience in use.
Most parents reflected that the size and the material of the toy bricks should be safe and nontoxic to children.
The first version of homepage is designed for a single function of character generation and selection.
In the iteration version, "Rewards" button is added, making this main function easier to find.
Also onboarding section gives users a overall understanding of this app and acceptable for children.
Adding animation as instruction to help children better understand how to generate a new character by selecting appropriate bricks.
Add a separated subpage for character selection so that users don't need to scrolling all way down for selection.
Give a step by step guide at the beginning of the game to shorten the learning curve.
Remove "hint" button in the page, instead, "Question" button is added at the lower right corner to provide help in the middle of the game.
Add contents to setting page and make the navigation clearer for easier information searching.
Change the horizontal scroll to the combination of both horizontal and vertical scroll for better classification of completed and locked achievements.
The physical toy bricks are made of steel, sandstone, rubber, plastic, and TPU material to make sure that it can provide multiple feeling of touch to children as well as be safe to play.
Arduino prototype is built for primary testing of the connection between bricks and computer via RFID tag and reader.
1. It is my very first UI/UX project, so without doubt it lacked of some consideration in design ( from the prospective for now as a HCI student):
Although I had tried my best, but due to the pandemic and lack of resource, I did not have enough sample for both user interview (2 user samples) and user testing (6 user samples), which led the result more subjective.
A material can lead to multiple sensory feelings, like steel can represent both the feeling of cold and hard. More detailed design should be considered.
2. From the user interview and texture experiment, I started to realize the importance of getting closer to users. Only in this way I can dig deeper to the real need of users, understanding what they think and how they behave, from where I can better design user experience for them.