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Engaging kids to become better inventors through community design challenges.
littleBits are electronic building blocks that empower kids to create inventions large and small using STEAM education principles (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math). The primary audience are kids ages 8 and up, both at home and in the classroom.
The community team had been running design challenges for about a year, and we had realized how effective they were at activating our customers. The littleBits platform itself did not support challenges, creating a suboptimal user experience for the team and customers alike.
Our team designed and implemented the experience in advance of our big summer challenge that was planned for July. Leading up to this, I focused on the core user experience and defining the user journey for our community platform.
My role during the project:
I met with the community team and learned about the issues our community members were having with current format.
I also met with our product team about incorporating the design challenges that they used in product booklets. We decided to explore the possibility of including this additional feature.
Consolidated notes from stakeholder interviews.
Through my research I gained an understanding of the established patterns used by our competitors. I pulled participation data through a combination of Google Analytics and direct database queries to establish a baseline.
Timeline highlighting typical user journey for new customers.
Early sketches and a planning session.
I presented my research findings, key user flows, proposed structure, and recommendations for an MVP feature set to key stakeholders. We got the green light to move on to the design phase.
Proposed structure for new challenge experience.
I first started with some sketches and then created high-level mobile wireframes outlining the general experience. I reviewed the experience with the community and product teams as lo-fi Invision prototypes.
Lo-fi mobile wireframe Invision prototype.
Our developer’s timeline extended on another project cutting our development time by a week and a half. We had de-scope the requirements in order to meet our deadline. This provided us with an opportunity to simplify the experience, but it also meant we would have to delay the launch of challenges on our iOS app. I worked with our product manager to comb the features and figure out what the minimum viable product (MVP) would be.
I finished the desktop and mobile wireframes and added annotations to help guide our developer as he started to build the customer-facing experience. I worked with our UI designer to finesse the final design, and I created wireframes for the admin interface.
Final annotated wireframe deck illustrating the Challenge home page.
I partnered with our developer to ensure we implemented the experience as envisioned. During the alpha stage, we were able to have some community members use the new experience. We received some great feedback, but we only had time to fix critical bugs before launch.
Final implementation of the desktop challenge details page.
We were able to hit our target date. The next month we hosted our big Summer challenge and set a new bar for participation. Overall the project was a success.
In retrospect, we initially cast our net too wide with the amount of features we wanted to include. Ultimately, the time restraints helped push us to a more focused experience. In the end, the project was a success and the metrics showed a significant lift in our engagement numbers. I also believe we succeeded in creating a better experience for our customers.
