Litasaur aims to close the literacy gap by coaching family members to help cultivate reading habits in young scholars.
The client desired to give parents resources on how to start early with encouraging their children to read and love learning.
This is more necessary for families in low-income areas whose schools might have lower budgets or immigrant families who struggle with connecting with their school community.
Six people who were parents with children that were 4th grade and below were interviewed to help us understand how much engagement the parent had with helping their children with homework or reading in general.
As expected, many people reflected on their time during COVID-19, and how some parents were left scouring the internet for resources and supplemented lesson plans when districts have been slow to offer instruction.
Others with fewer resources and limited time waited for schools to provide direction. Many struggle to teach some subjects and have no idea how to evaluate their child’s progress.
Most parents agreed: Trained teachers are much better suited to the job.“I’m not trained to be a teacher,” said one parent. “It’s nowhere near as comprehensive of an education as they were getting in school. I’m trying my best.”
The fonts Quicksand and Avenir are used throughout the app.
Quicksand is playful and more youthfully expressive, while Avenir is clean and more effective in communicating the body copy.
When selecting UI components, only one emphasis color was selected along with the use of gradients, white, and dark gray.
Paper and pen is the best way to start organizing the information that had been already been gathered.
After creating layouts, a mascot was created after gaining inspiration from Duolingo, the popular language learning app. It brought a lighthearted and fun visual to all of the information.
Staying in black & white, the sketches are transferred into high-fidelity wireframes that are easy to experiment with.
This is where consideration of interactions and animations begins, and the brand begins to mesh with the interface.
The final app designs are created with both the parent and the child in mind.
Though mainly for the parent to access the reading plan and resources, we included a “child’s game play” mode for the child to access ebooks, audio books, and reading games.
After our splash screen, we offer both a working English and Spanish prototype. The language can also be changed in the profile settings.
This is where the parent would start out to access all the features of the app. They would have access to:
The start button on the reading tracker would start the child’s reading portion.
The books & games resource pages are in tile format and contain filters to sort through the correct reading level for the child.
There are four weeks to the reading plan, and each week has five days of instructions. It includes an video, as well as tips on how to engage in your child’s reading, and a suggested activity for the day.
These are the pages designed for the child user. Similar to the adult’s reading plan, the child will get a new map each week and can interact with it during the week days.
The child will get to choose a book to read for fifteen minutes and then would be rewarded with playing a word game. While reading, they will listen to an audiobook and can read along.
To avoid them leaving the child zone, a password is necessary to leave.
After Litasaur was designed, usability testing was conducted by asking clients questions on the overall effectiveness and first impression of the design. Some of the feedback was helpful in identifying weak points that could be solved through simple solutions, and those changes have been made. That's the value of User Research!
