Bridget Pivac - UX + XR Designer

Educational mobile game

2016-2021

Overview — I co-founded a non-profit organisation with 5 others. Checheza was a passionate development team creating an educational app for children. Our mission was to create a free and open source app to assist young children learn the basics of reading, writing and math.

My role—Sole designer

Responsibilities— As the sole designer in a startup, I had a wide range of tasks. Primarily I focussed on the app where I designed the games, ui, ux, concept art and wrote specifications for the game design. On the branding side, I created new logos and fonts, produced branding guidelines, took photographs, designed and coded the website.

Collaborators—The 5 other co-founders: 2 business development, 2 developers, 1 marketing

Wide scope of challenges

Over the six years, I worked on various types of projects, ranging from small-scale features to larger, more complex initiatives. The following two examples show this range:

Game specs for “Learn my letters”
User research on target market

Game specifications: “Learn my letters”

This game encouraged writing on three levels of difficulty and the focus was on learning individual letters; their shape and how they sound. There were a lot of audio effects to encourage learning and also to demonstrate the sound of the letter.

The introduction showed the letter situated in three different words with accompanying audio.
The first level involved colouring over a shape with an option of three colours. The goal was to make it fun and engaging while introducing the concept of a letter shape.
Second level encouraged directional colouring in, following the same pattern of how one would write the letter. The direction was demarcated by colourful animations.
The third level had no obvious indicators and the child needed to attempt to draw the lines in the correct pattern as one would write.

User research on target market

New tech, new language and cultural relevance.

Initially the target market was 7-10 year olds in East Africa who cannot access schools. There were issues with access to smartphones or tablets, storage capacity on phones and internet connectivity, so the app needed to be lightweight and work offline.

Additionally, there were design aspects to take into account such as designing for children who had not used touch screens before, how they would adapt to learning in a second language and how to ensure the design was culturally relevant to them.

We conducted user research, and usability testing in two rural locations: Matanana, Tanzania in 2016 and in Bududa, Uganda in 2017 to research these specific areas. I wrote interview scripts, conducted interviews, transcribed and analysed data through thematic analysis. The format was primarily semi-structured interviews using a non-probability sampling method. The group consisted of 20 children, 10 parents, and 4 teachers.

The Checheza team with our partner Illicit Africa program director and assistant, plus the children who attend the Illicit Africa tech centre in Bududa.

New tech

We tested competitor apps to understand how the children interacted with the devices. They were curious and explored easily to understand how the games worked. When working in pairs, they showed each other different gestures to interact. There were no issues with the kids adapting to this new tech.

Research conclusion

No specific design needed for the childrent to understand how to operate the devivces. If it is charged and the right app is opened, they will explore and figure out the goals.

Thomas, aged 10, showing Isaiah, 8 years, how to play a competitor app.

New language

The children grow up with their mother tongue (Swahili or other local languages) and start learning English once at school at five years old. The children we tested with had a large range of english language skills, depending on their age and school engagement.

Research conclusion

We needed to design for a wide range of English language levels as children in the same age group had varying levels of language and there was no consistent level for 7-10 years amongst the research participants.

Persona built on research participants

Solution

Reduce written text + add audio —I reduced the written language as much as possible, added voice prompts at all times and a lot of audio.

Simple menu navigation —The menu prompts (including main tree menu) were all icon based and simple choices to easily guide the child throughout the learning experience.

Cultural relevance

There were several aspects to designing the app and games with cultural relevance in mind. The target market of East Africa covered several diverse countries - multiple local languages, clothing and customs even within each country. We also wanted to step carefully with what we represented in the app, as the majority of the development team were European foreigners.

Research conclusion

A difference that we had not considered was between rural and city folk. They had different daily lives and used different tools, for example in rural areas, children would use a homemade abacus as you see Belinda, 9 years, holding in the photo. Children in the city have calculators and some have their own phones to use the built in calculator functions.

Solution

Characters —We did not want to use specific human characters or depictions of clothing specific to one of the countries. It was simpler to use characters based on animals or inanimate examples.

Treehouse with a native tree —Something comforting and playful like a treehouse. Based on the baobab tree which is endemic to many locations in Africa.

Removed calculator icon —we replaced this icon with numbers to represent the maths area of the app.