Creating a family storytelling app for all ages
Nine Tales
About client
Nine Tales is a startup helping children connect with family members who don’t necessarily live near them - grandparents, aunts and uncles - through storytelling.
Services
Research
Branding
Design
Project duration
1 year
Nine Tales is a startup that wants to tap on the power of stories to help children learn meaningful life lessons, inspire their creativity, and connect with their loved ones.
Challenge
Nine Tales saw an opportunity to connect families, especially those living in different parts of the world, through stories: Why not build a mobile app that could enable loved ones to audio record stories for children? They needed help bringing their solution to life.
Solution
Design a user experience that is user-friendly for all ages and encourages engagement with the stories that connect children with their family members
Results
Understanding the users through research
While Nine Tales had the initial concept, we helped test it and find opportunities to make their app the best it could be.
To do this, we created a prototype, and put it into parents’ hands. This is how we learned which features were most valued (e.g. finding stories that matched their child’s interest and were age appropriate) and which features didn’t work and why.
Designing to keep families connected
The App
With a clear understanding of what users needed from a children’s storytelling app, we worked closely with Nine Tales to establish the improved design concept. Here’s a look at the key design recommendations we made based on our research findings.
The Website
Tying back to the importance of building emotional intelligence through stories, we designed the website to look organic and raw, much like how emotions are in general.
The main banner on the homepage asks users to select how they are feeling from a dropdown menu. This would then bring them to another page consisting of a list of stories based on the selected emotion.
Users can browse stories by scrolling down the page, or by filtering by genres, emotions, or themes.
A meaningful brand on emotional storytelling
Because the Nine Tales name was inspired by Plutchik’s wheel of eight primary emotions, plus the ninth emotion of connection, it was important that we convey this through the logo.
We used a darker shade of green (olive), as it signifies comfort, trust, reliability, and stability. Yellow was added to convey the fun and bright energy of the organisation and its product.
We used a blob-shape to represent the organic emotions adults and children would experience with the different stories in the app. The blob was then further shaped into a digit ‘9’ to expand brand awareness.
Partnering with Nine Tales from the start enabled us to deliver a more cohesive strategy that impacted everything from brand to product. This is when we do our best work, when we work closely with like-minded partners to bring all of our strengths to the table.
"The team at 55 Minutes took a lot of effort to understand our needs and our client's needs, and strove to meet the needs well. The UX UI designs created for our storytelling app were well-received by stakeholders and our target users."
Arjuna Raj, CEO, Nine Tales
