Identifying the problem, inspiration, and empathizing

I was sitting in the train, noticed a seven-year-old girl was crying and arguing with her mother. She didn’t want to go to school because she didn’t do her homework.“ I hate writing a story. It is hard. I hate writing.”, she was complaining. Her mother was trying to convince her that writing a short story is fun.

Pain Point:

Learning can be a challenge for children. Education can be boring. As a software engineer and a system designer, I asked myself: “How can we make difficult things easy and turn the learning process into a fun process?”

Goal:

Creating a platform for reading and writing, and encouraging children to write correctly, can be a unique, creative, useful, and fun project. It has the potential to be very successful.

Impact:

Educating and encouraging children to read and write.

Challenge:

Writing platforms already exist for adults. We can not use the same platforms for children. Children have their own needs and requirements when using a social and collaborative platform. We need to design for children.

Questions to ask:

1. Why is writing a difficult process?
2. How to encourage children to write more? How to motivate them?
3. What are the current and existing similar platforms? Competitive analysis.
4. Who is the exact target audience?

We will find the answers to these questions by research and will improve our goal.

Research

Research 1:

Type: Contextual interview

Interview 1: Mother, 44.

. Motivation: She wants her children to learn writing. She thinks her 8-year-old is not old enough to show any interest in writing and sharing a story. Her 11-year-old girl always wishes that teacher call her name to read her stories for other students, but sometimes the teacher doesn’t have enough time for all students to present. Children like to have a larger audience. She thinks older children show more interest in reading and writing.

. Mental model: The teacher gives a subject and children will write about that. They will read it in the classroom or share it online with the class and teacher.

. Pain Point: Children need to present and show their ability to others. They wish to have a larger audience than just a class.

Interview 2: Mother, 48.

. Motivation: Wants to teach her child to write a paragraph.

. Mental model: The teacher and mother try to explain what is a paragraph to the child.

. Paintpoint: The child doesn’t understand and gets confused, angry, and not interested anymore. Writing is a challenging activity for some children.

Interview 3: Student, girl, 10.

. Motivation: Loves to write stories and she is brilliant.

. Mental model: She writes stories and reads them in the classroom.

. Pain Point: She is shy and hates to present in the class, she loves to share her stories online with the class. Some of the children are too shy to present their articles in front of others.

Interview 4: Middle school student, boy.

. Motivation: Likes to read stories. He likes to write about technology.

. Mental model: Writing in class and sometimes social media.

. Pain point: He says all educational platforms are boring.

Interview 5: English teacher

. Motivation: Being a great teacher. Teach effectively.

. Mental model: Teaches in the classroom and uses technology for teaching.

. PainPoint: Finding a way to motivate children and keep them engaged is hard, especially with e-learning.

Personas:

Based on the interview we define our target audience.

The platform doesn’t work for younger children who just started reading and writing. Our users need to have a basic knowledge of writing.

Sharing stories and articles is a great feature, as it encourages the children to write and show their skills to the world. Their work can be seen. It motivates them to write more.

We don’t want to teach writing from scratch. We would like to teach children to write impressive articles and short stories. Older children can share adult platforms for writing and are more skillful in writing, So we consider our user’s age 9 to 14-year-old kids.

Persona 1: Jane, 10.

She likes to write and share with large audiences. She is shy. She likes to write short stories but doesn’t like to be at the center of attention and read her stories aloud. She likes writing contests. She wants to be a famous writer one day.

Persona 2: Tom, 14.

He writes about science and technology. He wishes to share his articles with others. He is very good at working with computers. He needs some training for writing scientific and non-fictional articles. He criticizes boring educational applications.

Persona 3: Mel, 38.

Mother of two children. She wants to help their children to learn. Her children are home-schooled. She needs resources for training children. Using a safe platform for children is very important for her.

Persona 4: Rayan, 30.

He is an English teacher. He likes to use technology when he teaches. He wants his students to use an engaging and fun system to improve and practice their skills.

Research 2:

Method: Online research:

Question: How to design for children?

Link: How Carl Orff’s teaching method can inspire user experience designers By Niusha P.

Research 3:

Method: Competitor analysis, finding similar platforms:

1. Medium: Medium is one of the best platforms for writing. It can inspire us to create a similar platform for children with special security and safety considerations. We need to add an eLearning feature to our writing platform to help the children to write correctly and professionally.
2. Khan Academy: It is a great eLearning platform. It can be inspiring for our e-learning part of our platform.
3. mystorybook.com, bookcreator.com: There are lots of great websites and apps for creating storybooks. Their writing editor can be inspiring. Their goal is just creating storybooks. Magic pen platform considers several categories and also professional writing such as essays and scientific articles. Learning and social media can be our main focus

Ideation and Goal improvement

• Target audience age should be considered carefully: Pre-school and first graders are starting to read and write, still very young for using the platform, and teens older than 14 are skillful in grammar and writing and have ability close to adults. The best target audience for us is the children group between this range; 8-year-old to 14-year-old.
• Device consideration: Mobile, tablet and PC or laptops (Mac, iOS and Windows)
• The platform should be fun. Optional audio files can be added to the articles, kids can read their story and record their voice, then add it to the system. This is fun and also helpful for the students who are shy to present. Contests and a rating system can be added for fun and measuring progress. We need to have rewards for motivating children to come back and write and share more.
• Short and fun training modules should be added to help children to improve their writing. We should consider what kind of training we need: Live, video, audio,…
• The safety of the environment should be seriously considered.
• Have a simple editor
• Grammar correction
• Adding pictures, paintings, figures, numbers, and shapes in the editor
• Topics: topic categories, title suggestions, and Random title generator as a fun and inspiring activity

Improved goal:

Our goal is to design a writing platform for children between 8 to 14-year-old. Based on our research, children need to showcase their great job. They use this platform to learn different kinds of writings(such as articles, essays, scientific researches, short stories) and to share their work(Social media section). The training contains how to write and grammar short courses and are in the form of videos, interactive animation, and written articles. The social media section lets the children share their work, read, like, or comment on other’s posts.

The platform must be easy to use, fun, and secure.

Our final goal is implementing:

• Reading feature
• writing feature
• Learning feature
• Simplicity
• Fun, interesting, and motivating features that attract and keep the users
• Security and safety

Magic Quill — Project definition:

User journeys and page descriptions

• The user visits the app for the first time and can browse the app, use free lessons. Some lessons are free, For reading free lessons no need to subscribe. If a user wants to write and share a story or an article, then needs a subscription. If a user wants to use the full features and access all courses, needs to sign up, log in, and pay the subscription.
• The user needs to create a profile after the first login. The profile page is editable whenever needed.
• The first-time user will see the onboarding page. The user can select interests for customizing the reading feed.
• The user has access to setting and security features, profile, notifications, parental portal, reading feed(social media), writing feature, and learning resources through a menu or navbar.
• The user can browse articles through the reading feed page. Can like an article, write a comment, share on other social media, and follow the writer. Reading feed can be based on interests, new articles, featured articles, suggestions, and writers that the user follows.
• The user can search the reading feed page.
• The user can customize interests, switch to dark mode, terms and conditions and privacy policy, manage membership and payment and security options through the setting page.
• If the user decides to write, will use the editor. The editor has font selection, size and type, add images from provided images or upload from other resources, add cartoons and characters, or upload them. The editor has a simple spell check and grammar correction or can be integrated with external grammar check apps. The user adds a favorite subject, the system suggests subjects or provides random subjects for inspiration. The user can save a draft or post in selected categories
• The user should be able to edit and delete drafts and published articles.
• The user wants to learn about writing so goes to the courses page. A list of courses is provided based on categories. The list is searchable, can be filtered and sorted in different ways.
• After completing the course, the user will get a badge and the course title will be added to the list of completed courses of the user.

The site map, Information architecture

First Sketches

Color and typography, Logo, Icons, and graphic

Tool: Adobe XD

Font should be simple and friendly, not distracting, and help to focus on the content. Using sans serif fonts makes the text as easy as possible. The counters should be rounded and open, not angular nor rectangular.

Using lots of white space makes the text readable andsimple.

“Century Gothic” font matches our needs. We will use it.

Yellow, green, blue, and purple create an attractive palette for children. Yellow has been used for the menu and navigation bar. The second color would be blue and adding black to it for logo design, creates a magical feeling. We use green and purple as accent colors. Black and white are used for the background and the main text.

High-fidelity wireframes and Prototype

Tool: Adobe XD

Sample designed for Android mobile app — Galaxy S10

This application needs to be tested by both children and adults.

The prototype was tested by six adults, four of them were parents, one was an experienced teacher, and one teenager who works with young children as a volunteer at the school. His feedback was interesting because he had the point of view of the children and adults at the same time. He was very interested in tech, devices, and games.
Parents showed great interest. They liked the simplicity and were curious about sharing security and curriculum content.

The teacher would use it as a training aid tool and grammar reference if the curriculum provides good content in the future.

The volunteer teen suggested creating interactive games for the learning feature. He liked the simplicity and gave some suggestions for improving UI and the pointing system.

The next step is testing with the children.

How to test the app with children?

• Have a plan
• Break the ice, start with a fun activity
• Have some sense of humor and a proper tone
• Let them know that they will get a prize to persuade them to take part in and continue with the session.
• Children tend to give the answer they feel you want to hear rather than what they really think
• Try and make yourself appear younger and interesting
• Ask simple and direct questions
• Let them use emojis to show their emotions
• Help them if they get confused but try to figure out the exact reason
• Find the patterns in the children’s behavior

Next steps, lessons learned, and new challenges

Based on our research and tests, we define the next steps.

An important part that needs improvement in this project is the learning platform and designing interactive short courses.

Courses should be simple, short, engaging, clear, using gamification, and attractive components, and animation should be designed specifically for children. This can be considered as a sub-project because it needs huge research, design, and test as mentioned before at the beginning of this case study. For example, a virtual teacher with a fantasy character can guide the students through the course. Using a proper sense of humor will engage children more.

Storyboarding and subject defining for the courses should be done carefully.

Error handling and giving feedback with a proper tone are very important because they might confuse the little users. Error handling should be implemented very carefully.

Adding a section dedicated to parents is necessary. (Parental portal)

Security and providing a safe environment are vital considerations as this app has been designed for children.

Providing shareable online certificates after completing levels of courses is encouraging.

Conclusion

We have completed design thinking phases (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test), but this process is not linear and these steps will repeat and repeat until we have the full product and even beyond that.

This platform fulfills our goal of educating and encouraging our children to read and write.