The Brief

Create an interactive experience that lives up to the KIDS DISCOVER brand. How could you not be excited when KIDS DISCOVER calls and asks you to help bring one of their most popular magazines to the iPad? With over 40 pages of interactive informational material, this might be one of the coolest space apps available. But don't take my word for it - Apple rated it "New and Noteworthy".

The Role

Development and Creative; Responsible for gathering business requirements, creating UX concepts, Information Architecture, Content Strategy, User Research, Animation, Visual and Interaction Design, App Development, Project management.

The Challenges

• Delivering a quality interactive learning experience within a strict budget and aggressive timeline.
• Organizing and creating a narrative from 150 pages of content.
• Gathering and creation of imagery and experiences to support content.
• Development for iOS.

Discover

Our first order of business was to create a narrative to build the experience around. Any great experience starts with a good story. After spending a good amount of time breaking down all the magazines content we had a rough draft. We decided we would bring the client in for the initial mapping stage and have some fun. We taped a large sheet of paper to the wall and started patching it together.

Because the budget wasn’t sufficient for developing a heavily interactive app we drew a chart with peaks and valley’s. This would help us balance the levels of interactivity and engagement throughout the app while still maintaining a solid narrative.

Mapping it Out

The next step was to organize the high-level chart into a set of chapters. We used icons to represent different types of interaction and colors to show the levels.

From there the KIDS DISCOVER team could refine the copy and start collecting credits while we began the design and development. I structured it so that we could move pieces around and see how they effect the flow and narrative.

Design

Designing an educational interactive experience for children is one of the most rewarding and enjoyable things we’ve ever done. After 2 months of designing we had an amazing product in hand.

Then Apple dropped the Retina iPad! We had to go back through every section and redesign and recompile them for Retina. With every project you gain valuable lessons that are carried through every project moving forward. At Thinkbigr we know we must do everything we can to design non-destructively. This is even more important now that everything we create has to be device agnostic.Our assets need to be used on myriad of products and platforms.

Cover

On most projects Im a big advocate of building from the content out. So after all the sections were complete it was time to design the Cover experience. From the beginning we new we wanted to treat the apps introduction like a shuttle launch. We decided a literal approach wouldn't cut it. We needed something more high- level that speaks to the content a whole. I used planets, old NASA audio clips, and some 3D animated type to achieve what you see to the right.

Space Card Match Companion App

We decided that we wanted to deliver something that would launch alongside the Space App to help promote it. After looking through the various modules we built for the app we decided that we would go with the memory game.

This project had an extremely quick turn-a-round, but we knew we wanted it to stand on it’s own and not be a watered down promo. Just like the app we broke it into themes with 3 levels each. After the completion of each level you win a prize and unlock the next. We used assets from the Space App and created a few new ones.