Logo and iOS app design for Twigtale's mobile story creation platform, Storyboard.
In Collaboration With:
Betina Chan-Martin - Head of Product
Christine Shimizu - Head of Marketing
Philip Starner - Lead iOS Developer
Lindsey McGrath - Head of Customer Relations
Sarah Reisert - Social Media Manager
My Contributions:
Ideation, Wireframes, Prototype, UX Research Synthesis, UI Design
Introduction
It’s a great problem to have when a product starts satisfying more people than it intends to - but it’s still a problem and if a startup wants to see itself past its first year, it has to scale.
Twigtale, an online platform that creates personalized books for kids was facing this kind of problem. Parents started making books for parents, teens started making it for their friends, non-parents started books to other non-parents and in the end, Twigtales were being for children and adults too.
The team often heard testimonials that praised the children’s Twigtales but wished there was a way a mom could make a book for her girlfriends’ night out, or a grandparent can make a good for their newly grads. Suddenly in a brainstorm meeting, a phrase was said that caught the team’s attention: “This certainly brings us back to the… drawing board”. Replace “drawing” and “story” and the team created the name Storyboard where anyone can make a story for anyone but more importantly, anywhere.
The Demand for Deep Personalization
Twigtale was first and foremost founded with the idea of bringing meaningful story books the capabilities of being fully editable - much like cofounder Nishad's very first prototype of a Twigtale book. Shortly after the company was founded, the initial Twigtale Team conducted a market research (via Google Forms) on how much of a demand was needed for deep personalization in story book making. Here are the takeaways:
Figure 1 - Market research after launch
As part of my first 30 day goal, I helped put together a competitive/comparative analysis of other brands that made customizable photo and or story books and listed some qualities that we liked from each experience. What we found was:
• Most companies offer little way of customization. There aren't many opportunities to edit the story script or edit the illustrations within the book.
• Some companies offer ways to add the audience in the book via the way of a character that appears in the book as part of the illustration. The 'avatars' are customizable with a set of limited features such as skin color, hair color, hair type, gender, etc.
• Very little companies actually use photos as part of the story.
Figure 2 - Comparative Analysis between book making companies
Next Betina, our Head of Product and I plotted the companies we studied in the competitive analysis (plus a couple more not featured in the analysis) and plotted them in a 2x2 matrix divided by the amount of personalization via text versus the ability of adding photos. We clearly saw an opportunity to provided both features as we were already doing so in our product. But we wanted to add:
• The ability to create any story; not dependent on a specific script.
• The ability to guide/prompt the user to create a meaningful story without feeling overwhelmed by the possibilities or the 'dreaded blank page'.
Figure 3 - Comparative Analysis Matrix to identify key opportunities
Our Challenge
The team agreed then that the goals of Storyboard were to provide the Magic of Twigtale but with the convenience of a mobile app:
• Take the magic of story time to people of all ages and all topics
• Allow users to make stories on the go, literally anywhere with a signal
• Allow users to have the same editing and personalization power as in a desktop platform
Not Just for Parents and Children
If we wanted to keep the magic of Twigtale, we certainly had to honor our longtime personas, which are working class parents who are looking for meaningful and unique ways to create connection with their children. But what we've heard from Lindsey, our Customer Relations expert, feedback from customers started shifting the user base to more non-parents and for needs that were not based on children's needs. These started to include women of all ages who were making books to give during a bachelorette party, friends giving friends books to celebrate their pets, or empty-nesters giving books to their recently moved-out kids as housewarming presents.
Figure 3 - Users that you would expect to share and receive scenes
Next, the team came up with questions similar to the structure of “who, what, where, when, why, how” to help kick off before we started generating ideas:
• Who might these stories be for?
• What imagery and graphical elements are being used for these stories?
• Where are users creating their stories?
• At what time are they making their stories?
• What is the state that these stories are being created? (In context, are they being done quickly as opposed to slowly with more thought)
• Why are these stories different than children’s topics?
Converging on these ideas was a lengthy process. The chart below shows an affinity mapping of these ideas so that it’s easier to group patterns.
Figure 4 - A rather messy affinity map
After doing a user flow, we did notice that the user has too many clicks to finally get to creating/editing the book. One idea that really stood out in the ideation phase was finding a way for the user to edit the book while on the book detail page - potentially securing a faster way for the user to check out.
Wireframes / Prototype
Because this experience was native and unique to mobile devices, we created a general task flow before we moved onto moving into wireframes. Because of our sprint schedule, I decided to skip low fidelity mocks and moved to mid fidelity mock as the team worked on the branding and UI.
Figure 5 - Task flow made it easier to create the first phase of mock ups
Figure 6 - Mid-fidelity mock ups
This was also a branding exercise since these titles were not tied to any of their previous titles nor was it tied to previous topics. Previously, Twigtale titles and topics centered more on heavily charged themes such as identity, parents/family relationships, and key life events. Storyboard titles were timeline based such as going on vacation, a birthday party, or a graduation event. These titles needed to stand alone and required a departure on visual design.
Figure 7 - Brand exploration
Figure 8 - Visual exploration
Putting it all together, we ended up with an app that had some flavor of a Twigtale but definitely a departure from its current book titles. Below shows a brief walkthrough of the app which you can download and try for yourself here.
Figure 9 - High-fidelity mock ups
Figure 10 - App demo
Marketing and Feedback
The first build of the app featured a book for a Family Trip, a Birthday Party, A Day At and any Celebration. Initial launch of the app yielded a low download rating - 75 downloads, but we knew that integrating a landing page, a link from the Twigtale homepage and social media marketing would boost the numbers.
The second release featured new topics regarding baby specific titles (First Year, First Day) and titles for Weddings and Graduations which yielded a higher number in downloads (175 downloads).
Figure 11 - Storyboard landing page
Figure 12 - Marketing campaigns for Storyboard via Mailchimp, Facebook and Instagram
Before my engagement ended with Twigtale, we didn’t get a chance to do any user testing but we did get some helpful customer feedback.
My Take Away:
What was groundbreaking about the Storyboard was that users didn’t need to be stuck behind a desktop or laptop anymore to make a book and now anyone could make a book for almost anyone and for any occasion. The user flow could definitely use some improvement but at least the team has some good foundations to build upon knowing that they’re bringing the magic of story time to children and adults alike.
You can find Storyboard mentioned at TechCrunch's June 23rd article and can be downloaded from iTunes.