O Dinos
O Dinos is a transmedia product that supports families in school preparation and scaffold children’s social and cognitive development. Having taught young children in preschool, I care deeply about children's learning. Knowing that not all families have the privilege to go to preschool, I wanted to help families embark on school-readiness journey more smoothly. That's why I started this project!
Duration
1 year (2022-2023)
My Role
UX Research, UX Design, Content Creation, Playtesting
Team
Deepak Dennison (app development, video creation)
Tools
Qualtrics, Figma, Adobe Indesign, Gen AI, Next.js, Glide App
A Pressing Problem
In the u.s., over 50% of children are not ready for school
School readiness is a big predictor of academic success for children (Hayakawa el. al, 2013). However, 52% of children from low social economic status (SES) and 25% of medium and high SES children are not school-ready (Williams et. al., 2019).
While preschools teach school-readiness skills, not all families have the privilege to send their children to preschool.
Solution
Leverage parental engagement in school-readiness journey through storybooks and a companion app
Storybook series with school-readiness content, including pro-social behaviors, emergent numeracy, and emergent literacy.
Web app companion for parents to visualize different school-readiness skills covered in O Dinos storybooks and to learn more.
Design process overview
Phase 1: Understanding the problem and users
School-readiness in a nutshell
Through literature review and interviews with domain experts, including preschool principals, we learned that school readiness is a set of cognitive and socio-emotional skills that helps children be successful in school both academically and socially. Moreover, leveraging parental engagement is key to promoting children's learning.
Parents don't know how to have quality learning time with children
To learn more about parents' perspectives of school-readiness, my teammate and I conducted the following research:
• 20 parenting surveys through Qualtrics
• 3 visits playgrounds to conduct interviews with parents
• 2 home visits to conduct interviews and observe interactions
We learned that many parents incorporate story time into their daily routine, and they view it as a sacred bonding time with educational values. Although parents want their children to learn, few of them know essential school-readiness skills children need for school. What's more, a majority of them feel guilty for not spending enough quality time with their children. The parents want more quality learning time with their children to help their children gain the best possible start for school.
Leveraging parental engagement
Parental engagement can help promote children's learning through 2 mechanisms:
• Joint Media Engagement: The shared experience between caregivers and children while interacting with media to enhance learning and development.
• Guided Participation: The collaborative interactions between a child and a more knowledgeable person to facilitate the child's learning and mastery of skills.
Phase 2: Learning through prototypes
How might we best facilitate parent-child engagement and help children learn?
There are 2 main design challenges:
1. Parents often"zone out" when engaging with children's content
2. Parents do not know enough about school-readiness skills their children need to learn
Based on research from phase 1, storybooks are a preferred learning medium for parents and children. Therefore, the following prototypes are in storybook formats.
exploring Interactivity within storybooks
Prototype 1: simple book
2 parents experimented with this prototype and recommended us to make it more interactive. We also learned from librarians that dinosaurs are among the top 3 most popular themes for children. Hence, we changed our main character from a kangaroo to dinosaurs.
prototype 2: interact with surrounding
The second iteration contained activities for children to engage with their surrounding and opportunities for parents to engage with tasks by sticking egg stickers. We even dabbled with gen AI to provide songs and customizations to the overall experience.
However, children can quickly get distracted by their surroundings, especially when they have fun toys near them. We also found the parents not very engaged in the storyline because it didn't have a strong plot.
Therefore, in phase 3, I rewrote the storyline and designed torso-up activities that can keep children engaged in the story without bringing in sources of distraction.
Phase 3: Building an engaging solution
How might we best facilitate parent-child engagement and help children learn?
With insights from phase 1 and 2, we aligned our goal of designing storybooks that are engaging for parents and children. After a lot of ideation and prototyping, we realized the power of nostalgia in creating captivating experiences for adults. We decided to leverage this feature into our storybooks by incorporating elements from classical movies from the parent's generation.
1. Parents often"zone out" when engaging with children's content [Found a solution!]
2. Parents do not know enough about school-readiness skills their children need to learn
To expedite the illustration process, I used our in-house AI image generator to create the backgrounds, and I drew the dinosaur figures on the foreground.
To address parents' needs to learn more about school-readiness, we also developed a companion web app prototype using a no-code platform for the parents to understand the different school readiness skills with tips backed by research.
1. Parents often"zone out" when engaging with children's content [Found a solution!]
2. Parents do not know enough about school-readiness skills their children need to learn [Found a solution!]
Design features
1. Nostalgic elements
These elements, like the classic Titanic pose and the train to a magic school, serve as little easter eggs to keep parents engaged in the storybook.
2. Talking nudges
Sentences highlighted in yellow serve as talking nudges to encourage parents and children to engage in short discussions.
3. Tasks for children
Tasks For Children allow parents to provide scaffolding for children and facilitate guided participation.
4. Companion web app
Parents can learn more about different school-readiness themes and pro-tips through the web app companion.
Learner testing
Pre and post study surveys
We tested our storybook and the web app prototype with 8 families. We divided the testing process into 3 stages to assess the effectiveness of O Dinos.
Stage 1. Pre-study survey
Findings:
• All participating parents read storybooks with their children at least 2 times a week.
• Parents do not understand the different components of school-readiness.
Stage 2. Playtesting
Findings:
• 2 parents skipped through the instruction page on how to use interactive tasks and the web app.
• Both parents and children engaged in the reading process and completed at least 50% of activities.
Stage 2. Playtesting
Findings:
• Both parents and children loved the interactive nature of the product.
• Parents found the storybook to be more engaging compared to the other storybooks they read to their children.
• Parents learned more about their children through the prompts and activities.
overall reception
Presenting to a broader audience
O Dinos was well-received by various stakeholders including families, educational researchers, and children's media specialists in the Bay Area.
Learnings & Moving forward
My biggest takeaway is learning how to design engaging user experiences for both young children and their parents at the same time. It was challenging to maintain children's attention because they have short attention spans. However, it was equally challenging to design for parents so that they also feel involved and engaged in the overall experience.
I'm planning on adding vignettes for parents' companion web app so that parents can better digest the pro-tips. Updates will be posted on our web app. I'm also planning on publishing O Dinos storybooks.
Feel free to learn more about O Dinos through its web page. Stay tuned!