Spintales
Client: Tilt, Welspun
Augmented reality | Textile | Kids | Infotainment
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'Tilt' is an innovative wing within Welspun that focuses on experimenting with new-age technology to bring about innovations that push the boundaries of traditional textiles, creating new business opportunities for tomorrow. Their team approached us to collaborate on their new project - Spintales.
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Their idea was to enhance the quality time between parents & kids by creating a shared experience of storytelling over bed-time. A duvet cover was identified as the perfect piece of textile that is not only pre-dominantly present during bed-time, but is also very intimate. The storytelling experience was to be crafted with the help of an Augmented Reality app (built for tablets). They also wished to extend this experience over a rug, though here, the focus was more on 'play'.
The stories were to be presented in the tablet app through immersive animations. The magic came through Augmented Reality, where the characters from the story would jump out of the tablet in 3D onto the duvet or the rug! Parts of the story would then be experienced with the plot unfurling on the textile, as the characters come to life in three dimensions into the room on the duvet & rug.
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My role in the project was to design the User Experience of the app. The challenge was to build-in the right add-ons that increase the joy of 'story-listening' & break the uni-directional narration style. We also had to devise an experience that not only excites the kids, but is seen as valuable & worth investing in by the parents.
JOURNEY
01. MINDMAP
Very soon, we realized the vastness of this domain. We began with creating a huge mind-map of the associated areas that we need to address through research & then build-in into the experience of the app. These topics were spread across storytelling techniques, developmental psychology, curiosity, educational trends, toys & games, ergonomics, family dynamics, expression & of course, Augmented Reality.
02. RESEARCH
For the primary research, we collaborated with two agencies - Umber Learning Facility, which studied the Indian market & Maya, which covered the US market. These two agencies did a fantastic job of understanding various expectations of kids & parents, family dynamics, bed-room structures & ergonomics of space. There was a proof-of-concept developed by Tilt that was used to test the Augmented Reality & the basic storytelling experience in the app.
The secondary research was carried out by me in parallel. The topics covered in the research are shown in the images below. The research findings & insights were then used by us as the building foundation for the User Experience design.
Primary research in India
Storytelling
Techniques
Toys &
Games
AR Apps
Study
Education &
Learning
Behavior
Study
Ergonomics of
Use
03. IDEATION & BUCKETING
After a thorough research phase, we were now charged to enter into the ideation & brainstorming phase for the app experience. The research findings & insights created a strong foundation to build on.
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*Reasearch reports were confidential & hence can't be disclosed here.
Letting the creative juices flow
04. EXPERIENCE STORYBOARDS
Ideas were filtered & then joined together. We saw two distinct concepts emerge. We then created the experience storyboards for both the concepts for further evaluation & to see how the concepts fare as a journey. After editing these, we had a workshop with the clients to collectively arrive at the final concept.
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*Storyboard illustrations made by Dinesh C Kumar
Experience Journey Storyboards
05. INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE & CARD SORTING
With the final concept & experience journey in hand, we now had to move towards making the app. The first step towards organizing the features was to create an information architecture. Once the information architecture was in place, we created a set of cards with various feature sets as titles. We asked different people to sort out the cards onto a blank table. The placement of the cards gave us insights on the hierarchy, priority & grouping of the functions that seem intuitive to the users. We then took these findings as a guideline to refer to while creating the wireframes.
06. WIREFRAMING
This was an exciting phase as all the thoughts, ideas & insights were being molded in the final form of the app screens. We created the screens for logging-in, setting up a personal account, creating an avatar, purchasing more stories & then of course - the storytelling experience.
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In the storytelling experience, we had to craft smooth flows between cinematic & Augmented Reality. Certain parts of the story would be played as an animation on the screen. The users could go to the next scene or even the previous one using the arrow buttons given ergonomically. Scenes of the story were interspersed with interactive games for learning that seamlessly merged with the story flow. The games had different modes of interactivity - touch, sound, titling the screen, etc.
Cinematic scenes would be followed by Augmented Reality scenes, where the characters would appear on the duvet on the kids' lap. These were carefully crafted to increase the drama and excitement in the story.
06. VISUAL DESIGN
The visual design was crafted following the brand guidelines of Tilt. The story characters & animations (both 2D & 3D) were developed by the Visual Communications Lab at Tata Elxsi.
07. USER TESTS
It is a mixed feeling of fear & excitement when you have to test the system you've ever-so-carefully designed. You are aware of the hasty decisions, the ones made on the basis of timeline or budget, the ones made because someone 'felt' so & so on. Through this unique journey of pushes, pulls & challenges, a product has emerged - and now it stands at the most important part of its journey - does it work?
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Thankfully it did - though what we observed was something we did not expect:
1. Grabbing a child's attention is a little more difficult than we thought.
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2. Augmented Reality created a sense of wonder, excitement & magic for the parents & other adults, but not the children! Most kids did not seem amused by it, much like we don't feel amused by sitting on a chair flying in air (aeroplane). It seemed 'normal' or 'expected'.
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3. The slightest lag in response after a button push made the app feel 'broken'. This would cause the user to push that button space again, though in that split second, a new screen would have loaded underneath with a different button in that space. Feedback has to be crisp & instantaneous.
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This was one of the most exciting projects for me to have worked upon. Given the vastness of the project stakeholder ecosystem, there was a lot to learn, not just in terms of subject learning, but also in terms of coordination & communication - we had the clients, content writers, research experts, character designers, sound designers, visual designers & software developers.
The subject at hand too was extremely broad & exciting. A lot has been learnt & taken from this journey. Can't wait to work on a brief as interesting as this again!