Phonological Awareness
This project began in the summer of 2020 when the Spanish team at Istation identified a need for age-appropriate content for pre-reading students.
The team's educational experts identified the foundational tools students need to prepare for their reading journey and shared with us the classroom strategies that teachers employ to teach these concepts. I used rough sketches to lead brainstorming sessions, aiming at emulating these classroom strategies.
The following design principles guided us in designing this project:
The final piece of the puzzle was to engage students during these activities. I designed a reward system where students can collect friendly characters. They can then choose a friend from these unlocked characters to accompany them during the activities, offering help if the student gets stuck.
To accomplish this, I vectorized assets that were designed by our team's artist. I created a puppet rig with motion design animations to plug those vector assets into. Finally, the team's programmer put these assets and puppet rig together as unlockable characters. Overall, we ended up with hundreds of unlockable character variants, allowing for plenty of replayability and practice.
I created low-fidelity prototypes in Adobe XD for the activities we came up with during brainstorming sessions. Beginning with low-fidelity prototypes allowed us to test early and make changes to the designs as needed without throwing away more time-consuming development work.
I strongly advocate for early testing with target users. On this project, the team felt that it was critical to test our activity designs with pre-reading students specifically. We incentivized this by offering them free pizza and the students were thrilled to help us design our games.
The following examples demonstrate how usability testing influenced my design decisions on the Counting Syllables activity:
The Simple Tap version of the interface allows students to place counters in any order and remove them by tapping again. The design was intuitive for testers, but our educational experts didn't like the haphazard placement of the counters. In the classroom, teachers have students place counters left to right to prepare them for reading words left to right.
The Plus/Minus version of the interface uses plus and minus buttons to add or subtract counters. This proved too confusing as students this age are not yet familiar with these symbols.
The Disabled States version of the interface enforces a left to right counting order. My assumption that this was less intuitive proved incorrect. Not only that, but students actually enjoyed this version of the activity most!
We discovered through testing that students didn't intuitively tap on placed counters to remove them. To solve this problem, we added an eraser button.
Adding these activities to Istation's Spanish content library fulfilled a need that our teachers have had for years.
The design challenges I faced during this project, proved to be the most difficult but rewarding project that I have worked on. Designing intuitive and engaging content for users who are so young stretched my capabilities and honed my skills.