MY ROLE
Product Design
TIME
Dec 2017 - Now
PROJECT
Web Application
Introducing Cudos Kids
There are too many toys, books, games, animations in the market of early childhood education. It's very common to hear parents’ complains like "I don’t know how to choose the best ones among the huge ocean of items!”, "My kids don't like brushing teeth, I have no idea how to teach him!", and so on. From those complains, we found that a lot of parents chose mediocre or bad ways to fill their kids' time, such as giving them books without any nutrition, allowing them to overuse screen, and so on. Some parents chatted with their kids in negative ways.
Research shows that, for children under 3, it’s not just what’s on the screen that matters but that it’s on at all. Even if the TV is simply “on” in the room where the child is playing, there are negative effects.
Cudos choose book search and book recommendations as the first step to helping parents with educating children, because books could be a medium for parents to communicate with their kids. Also reading books is a very good way for parents to spend time with their kids. Cudos aimed to help parents save their time by making the search of good products or useful information for their children easier. Finally Cudos could help parents focus on what really matters-- reading to their kids.
In the end-to-end design cycle, our team researched pain points, brainstormed ideas, storymapped flows, wireframed and prototyped design concepts, conducted usability tests, and worked with cross-functional teams to get it launched.
Design for different user groups
Starting from zero, Cudos targeted its users as two groups, parents and teachers. Besides that, we had Cudos admin for generating and managing our data, including labels, book lists, book ratings, reviews from teachers and other detailed book information. Therefore, a challenge for Cudos was to design different user flows and different user interfaces for these three roles.
How to help
Cudos' mission was to help parents find the best books for their children. There were two problems needing to be solved in order to achieve the goal:
1. How to find the best books? How do we define a great book? How do we rank the books?
2. How to find suitable books for different children? How to help parents find books that their children like?
In order to know the answers of these two important questions, we gathered parents whose children were 0-5 years old, female mostly, to have some focus group discussions and interviews. We also sent surveys to more parents to obtain a better idea about what they really wanted.
What parents think
Parents are having hard times of finding appropriate books for their children. To get more insights on parents' behaviors and intents, we did 3 key-informant interviews with early childhood educators and 7 semi-structured interviews with parents.
The questions we wanted to figure out during the interviews included but not limited to:
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How did parents find books for their children in real life?
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What did make parents hard to find good books?
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How did they try to solve the problem of finding good books?
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How could technology help them?
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What did they care about when they were searching books for their children?
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What were their expectations for good books?
KEY FINDINGS
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Confirmed the pain point we noticed before: Some parents were confused about what books they should read to their children at an appropriate cognitive level, especially for new parents.
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Confirmed the pain point we noticed before: Some parents had more clear ideas about what kind of books they wanted, but due to the terrible user experience of the current tool it was difficult for them to find the books they liked.
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Trust issue. It was hard for parents to trust our ranking and rating at the first time they visited. Most people trusted and relied on the recommendations from family or friends when they tried to figure out which books were good.
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Lack of communications between teachers and parents. Parents sometimes didn’t know how to interact with their children when reading books to their children. However teachers usually were experts for this.
DESIGN INSIGHTS
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For each child, not every book was suitable for him/her. It might take time to find good books.
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Referrals from family and friends were very trustful, especially when they shared the books or reading lists for your kid’s age.
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We could use users’ profile, users’ behavior and keywords users searched to narrow down the book recommendations.
Cudos is born
Cudos was born with the name Kiwi and then we changed the name to Cudos before we launched it. In the agile development process, Cudos was iterated a lot based on usability tests, research results, and interview feedback from parents. We tried to minimize the efforts of finding books with both paper prototype and digital prototype.
Through the research and the user tests, the pattern of user behaviors became clear. Although most of our targeted users liked to read to their children, they had different thoughts and behaviors for the process of finding books.
Novice
Novice users liked to see the recommended books, suggested reading lists, and educational tips directly due to their limited experience of early childhood education. They could be somehow confused by huge amount of info, so they hoped to have some guidances to lead their ways. Most of them had been parents less than two years.
Medium
Medium level users wanted to know more about the details of the books, such as reviews from experts, feedback from other parents, and so on. They were on their way of learning how to raise their children. They had basic understandings of their children's interests and what books their children might like.
Expert
Expert level users already had concrete knowledge and plans for helping their children's reading. Most of time they had ideas about which books they wanted their children to read. For this category of users, they trusted their readings most.
The behavior pattern helped us build detailed persona for parents in each of these three stage. Here are some case studies showing the improvements Cudos has made.
Case study 1: Added more guidelines for users to get started
Below are the images showing what Cudos changed in the index page. Index page provides an onboarding experience for users who visit Cudos at the first time. We learned that many users felt difficult to get started when only facing a search box. We added the "Recommended Topics" as a guidance , especially for novice users.
However it was not enough yet. By observing how users went through the website, we found that users still got lost and felt bored very soon when they just saw a clean but dry page with only a lot of clicking words. Also some features were not easy to be discovered, for example, the icon at the top right corner was too small to be noticed. Besides that when users wanted to search title/author, they had to switch between the tabs, which was not user friendly.
For solving these problems, we refined the page that presented recommended book lists and emphasized suggested topics. Parents could start with looking at the book lists that might be useful for their children, or with searching books of the topics that their children might be interested in. Many users told us that the visual style of this page turned to be vivider, cuter, and more consistent with other products they used for their kids.
Case study 2: Provided more useful contents
We found that some users did not spend much time on our previous website. For keeping users staying for a longer time, I added the discovered section to each book so that users could learn educational tips about the topics each book touched. Also for most books I added a video of reading, so users could have better previews of those books.
Based on the parents' experience of ECE, we organized the information of each book in a hierarchical way, therefore the experienced parents could learn with less effort and less time. Because parents in different stages cared about different sections of info, teachers had their voice for which part should be paid more attentions to. The final page tries to consider all these circumstances.
Case study 3: Improved sharing functionality to help user acquisition
The first version did not pay much attentions to helping users share contents of our website. For this version, users could share the pages they liked with their friends so that their friends might come to our website and check the sharing contents out.
Now...
Cudos kids is helping parents to find good books for their kids easily, as well as providing educational tips and guidelines of reading books. Currently Cudos Kids is doing much better than the first version in user experience, user engagement and user acquisition.
