After working on Gepeto’s visual identity; I was invited to join the team once again this time as a UX/UI designer to help them create their iOS application.

In order for us to create a suitable animation app and an engaging platform for children, we needed to immerse ourselves in the world of storytelling applications to get a better understanding of the audience wants and needs.

Through quantitative and qualitative research, we were able to identify a few interesting facts:

Narrow it down

Our user target range was too wide. While doing some initial user testing, we found that depending on the content -especially the illustration’s style- we would attract different kind of users segregated mainly by age and gender.

We started by creating a feature and functionality document to outline hierarchy, user flow, and different ideas that we had at the time about how to solve some of the problems we had. We used all this information to design a storyboard that helped us identify how the interface changed in reaction to our user’s action.

Because we needed to showcase the app to stakeholders and investors as well as users and developers to get feedback, we opted to move from sketches/storyboard to rapid prototyping; mainly because we needed to clearly communicate the design and wireframes were not well suited to show dynamics and interaction.

This allowed us to create a working prototype in a short amount of time, making it easier to carry out usability testing and get better feedback in return. But even more important, we were able to demonstrate how the product works in front investors giving more credibility to the product and the company.

Of course, this design was all about the AR experience but in the process we learned that it required certain conditions for it to work at its best.

For starters, it was a juggling act for kids to balance iPad and markers at the same time so, it was necessary to rest the device on top of a stable surface. Not wanting to restraint the user’s playtime, we developed a more approachable concept by complementing the AR with a touch based experience while recording; this give the user the option to switch between touching to move the characters or using the physical marker depending on what the situation is.

On the other hand, we needed to educate the user as to how digitally attach different characters to each QR marker and to identify the markers among each other. Our solution was to pair every QR with an specific character slot by using the same colour as a differentiator. This way characters could be easily swapped digitally while markers could be reused on another play session.