Sachin Jose

04/10

Disney BYJU's Early Learn

About
BYJU’S in collaboration with Disney is designed for children from LKG to Class 3.

Roles
UX lead

Duration
2017 – 2020

My Role

I started as the UX researcher for this project and then took up the lead responsibilities. I was responsible for all the UX deliverables for this project. My role involved end-to-end co-ordination between teams from multiple disciplines. I was responsible for delivering game guidelines as well as usability guidelines for each age group. I have designed wireframes and prototypes for both parent and child experiences for the entire product. I have played an instrumental role in the ideation and concept forming along with stakeholders from the product, Game Design, and Art teams.

The process was a series of steps varying from understanding the user group, building prototypes, and testing prototypes to iterating them.

The initial phase of this research was built on a framework based on Piaget’s cognitive development theory for pre-operational kids and this process required us to observe the behaviour of children and their play patterns.
Talked to parents, grandparents (with whom kids spend more of their time), and pedagogy experts. Over the period of three months, The team wass able to gather insights and produce opportunity areas, that helped us in building prototypes and a stable workflow to test them with kids and parents. This eventually helped us in getting their feedback as well.

Designing for Kids

The approach is to keep interactions and feedback consistent and smooth for kids so that they find it easier to learn about the app at a quicker rate. One challenge that we had to overcome is the communication that should take place between the device and the child, that is, when the device is ready for input or when a transition occurs from passive to active experience.

For this very purpose, we have set a visual and audio cue to indicate to the child that the app is ready for interaction. This acts as the base framework for all the interactive videos and games that follow a narrative.

Since our developing platform is UNITY. We had to design all screens for the unity platform. Because of this direction we also have to think about scalability for multiple device sizes. We came up with an interactive area that is compliant with all device resolutions. Most of smart devices have an aspect ratio of  16:9. 4:3, and 2:1 for Android, IOS, and others respectively.
Designing interaction pillars​​

Tap

Based on the usability test we have identified Tap as the primary mode of interaction with the screen. It can be considered as the most intuitive and foundational touch interaction for children and can be used equally by all. When it comes to styling, made the tappable elements bigger and brighter, the buttons a bit more prominent – both in terms of size and in colour, texture, and contrast.

Drag

As we have observed while testing with our sticker book prototypes, it has been found that children love to trace and draw on the screen. Found that it is difficult for children in lifting fingers, especially on bigger interfaces. Solved this problem by providing partial completion.

Draw

Our sticker book feature is built based on the drag interaction. Children can just touch an object and drag it to a new location accordingly. But despite that, there is a possibility for them to have difficulty with finger-on-screen structure. An example of this could be the interaction of sticker deletion from the canvas on the sticker book. Realized that partial completion is the solution to this issue as well.

Designing for parents

The goal here is to give the parents a sneak peek at their child’s progress and/or ability to reiterate the learning quotient of the app. We intend to increase parent participation and enhance the learning process for children as well. The need for this method stems from the fear of parents that their kids might end up spending more time playing on digital media rather than learning. This calls for the requirement of a safe and secure environment with a choice to limit screen time for their children, hence leading us to create this project.
All parent-facing screens except the one in the child’s world are intentionally designed in portrait mode. During testing, we identified that it was very difficult for parents to enter the child’s details in landscape mode rather than portrait mode.

Learnings

The approach with this project is to keep kids as the focal point and design content specifically for them in a way they can consume it without any difficulty. Why do so? Because we feel like regardless of the immense amount of content available for kids on the internet, most of them were not designed keeping in mind the interests of kids.

Because of the unavailability of data for specific age groups, we had to start research on children of age 3- to 8-year-olds particularly, making the project a little bit more challenging than expected. The two main aspects we considered here were to design a platform that is more user-friendly and immersive for kids, while it is implemented in an age-specific manner, to make the process easier and more consumable.