Brice Bai

Grow Together: Adobe + Nickelodeon Creative Jam Design Challenge

Duration
April 2020
3 days
Tools
Adobe XD
Key Skills
UI/UX, Tablet App Design, Rapid Prototyping
The Team
Lawrence Wang


A few weeks after being sent home to quarantine, my partner and I formed team Rice & Rence to design Grow Together—a tablet app for the 3-day, US-college-wide remote Adobe + Nickelodeon Creative Jam. This would be an app experience for kids between 11 to 13 years old (grades 6 to 8) that also used some element of the Nickelodeon brand and incorporated either auto-animate or voice command features.

This was also our first time trying a design jam. :)

The Problem

Help kids feel safe, informed, and connected in the spirit of #KidsTogether. Design an Android tablet or Apple iPad app that provides a safe way for kids to communicate, share, and connect with their friends and family.

The Solution

Give kids and parents the opportunity to cultivate their own virtual world, learn more about COVID-19 through educational videos, do fun indoor activities with their favorite Nick characters, and ultimately stay connected with their community through expressing themselves on this platform.

Jump to final design decisions ↓
Observations
+ Research

Kids learn well in the process of creation

Integrating education with recreation is essential to creating an effective, beneficial kids app. This is why we ultimately decided on allowing kids to grow their own garden by consuming different educational content and fun activities.

Kids love rewards or feedback on their actions

Immediate feedback on all actions, whether it be visually or auditorily, is expected. Whereas adults may only want feedback on what they have done wrong, it’s important to give kids praise for what they’ve done right as well.

Challenges + competition are key motivators

As mentioned above, kids love rewards, and these rewards can be earned from surpassing challenges or winning competitions. Giving kids opportunities to accomplish rewarding tasks and compete against themselves or others helps them stay interested in the app.

Don’t forget about the parents

While we should focus on designing for children first, parents are another major type of user of kids’ apps. It’s still important to think of how they would want to interact with the app and their children. Parents generally also want their kids to learn while playing.

Due to the limited time we had, we focused on collecting information via secondary research through several articles. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Goals

Help kids stay connected to their classmates, friends, and family

Let kids express themselves privately or within a secure community

Give kids the ability to share photos, videos, creative projects, and more

Encourage kids through a game to learn about safety

Educate and empower kids on best practices and good habits to keep the household safe

Decision 1

Recreation mixed with education in a variety of different activities and content

On the explore page, kids are given different indoor activities with their favorite Nick characters, take quizzes about the Nick universe, and watch videos or read articles about the pandemic. Kids earn points through consuming these activities and content. By providing a wide variety of fun and educational content, kids have many options to stay engrossed in the app and are given the challenge to gain as many points as possible for rewards.

Decision 2

A carousel at the top, revealing friends’ activities

At the top of the explore page, a carousel of what activities friends have logged appears in order to encourage the user to check out what type of activities others are doing and to do more activities on their own end. Seeing friends’ logs, and subsequently their gardens, may encourage competition among each other and thus more activities being completed.

Decision 3

In-app messaging to share photos, videos, and activities within safe community

Activity and learning cards can be easily shared with friends and family. Kids are given the opportunity to express themselves within their community.

Decision 4

Parental controls for kids and letting them donate to Covid relief charities

Parents can suggest different activities or learning material about Covid for their kids. They’re able to help kids grow their gardens by approving their activities while being involved in seeing what they’re doing and learning. Parents are also given the opportunity to view local charities they can donate to for Covid relief.

Process
+ Style

Sketches

Lo-fi Wireframes

Information Architecture + Flows

In designing the wireframes and mockups, I particularly focused on the explore page, the message page, and the parental flow.

Kids

Parents

Final Design

Kids

Parents

Results

A top ten design in the competition

I presented our final prototype in a 3-minute presentation live to judges from Nick and Adobe. Our design won 6th place out of 145 teams.


Future
Directions

The judges loved the gardening and world building aspect of our app. They suggested digging deeper into that angle and creating a more immersive world. In the future, the garden could be fleshed out more with different varieties of “Nickified” plants. Simplifying the app to be more virtual-world-based would be the next exploration.

Additionally, being able to user test with kids would also be great. Lawrence and I had questions on whether our app would be suitable for middle-school-aged kid or a younger demographic. More observation and research into what apps current middle-school-aged kids are using should be done.

Let's Go
Back to all of my work, or check out:

Amazon

Sleep Tight

HiveDesk

X.ing

Nova

CODED + DESIGNED ON bricebai. 欢迎光临 ✌🏻