Little Light App for Children

One of my bigger projects of 2022 was the design and development of Little Light’s Children App. Keeping in line with the mission of Little Light, the Little Light App is an ambitious project to create a self-directed online version of Little Light’s ‘Curriculum of the Self.’

I worked on the conceptualization, design, and management of this project, in collaboration with content expert Likla Lall and Little Light founder Ritu Khoda.

A Brief Introduction

Little Light focuses on helping children discover their inner Selves and build spiritual fortitude. With stories, concepts, meditations, projects, and daily practices, the curriculum creates a vibrant and inclusive space of learning and self-discovery.

Developed by Ritu Khoda in collaboration with pedagogues and spiritual practitioners, the curriculum has been given shape by various authors, illustrators, animators, and voice artists. I had the pleasure of illustrating and designing the curriculum books for Grades 1-3 in 2019. These books are available to students across India in schools where the Little Light program has been implemented.

Framing the Problem Statement

With the pandemic in tow, Little Light’s school programs switched to online mode. With their limited reach, however, Little Light’s crucial programs were not available to many children across India, many of whom are (and continue to) struggling with isolation and depression.

There was a need to create an online mode of delivery of the Little Light curriculum that goes beyond classrooms and reaches children wherever they may be. This requirement formed the basis of my work moving forward.

How might we create a self-directed learning experience that encourages Self Discovery and Self Awareness?

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Defining the Approach

To get a deeper understanding of the requirement as well as our target user group, I proceeded with a children’s user study followed by a stakeholder workshop.

01 Research

My Role: UX Researcher working in collaboration with GDD
Tasks I took up: Creating research guides, interview scripts, conducting interviews
Tools used: Invision, Google Forms, Google Doc

With children as Little Light’s primary user group, I conducted a rudimentary UX research study, in collaboration with UX/UI consultancy GDD, Pune. The objective was to understand children’s relationship with digital devices and online learning.

Findings: Our observations led us to some interesting insights and areas of opportunity.

We worked towards how we can apply these areas of opportunity to Little Light’s existing pedagogy and curriculum.

02 App Vision

My Role: Product Manager working with the Little Light team
Tasks I took up: Conducting stakeholder workshop, Setting up workshop objectives & plan, Compiling deliverables
Tools used: Miro, Google Docs, Whiteboard (Physical)

I facilitated a 2-day workshop with the founder, writers and pedagogues to flesh out Little Light’s vision, objectives and nature for its digital learning product ie the Little Light App.

Questions that framed the workshop:

1. What is Little Light’s vision for its app?
2. What does the Little Light app want to be for a child?
3. What are the key focus areas that the app’s learning experience is built upon?

Through free-flowing conversations, mind mapping, and flow visualisation, the team and I explored several ideas and possible answers to the above questions. At each brainstorming round, I encouraged the use of divergent and convergent thinking to gather the maximum number of ideas followed by us narrowing down a precise perspective for the issue at hand.

With the app’s vision and framework in mind, my next step was fleshing out the learning experience itself. I did this by looking at what already exists in the marketplace, and mapping out what has the potential to be built uniquely.

03 Product & Market Research

My Role: Product Designer working with the Little Light team
Tasks I took up: App Review and Research, Analysing and comparing app features
Tools used: Miro

In order to understand the existing ecosystem, I reviewed various apps at the intersection of SEL, mental well-being, games, and learning. For a wider perspective, I included apps that targeted both adults and children.

My objectives for this exercise were to:

• Survey the product landscape in which Little Light would compete in
• Review the kind of solutions and services that Little Light’s competitors offer
• Identify what works, what doesn’t, gaps and opportunities

Product Landscape

Many apps’ offerings focused on specific areas of self-care – such as Guided Meditations or lessons around Social-emotional Learning. Some of them, such as Sayana, Evolve, My Possible Self or CBT Companion borrowed from larger psychological frameworks such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and offered several activities such as meditations, journalling, therapies and mood-checks for the user to choose from and interact with.

Product Mapping

The product mapping helped me and the team understand where on the spectrum we wanted the Little Light App to be. While most apps appeared to have a collection of self-discovery tools and therapies primarily addressing adults, we wanted Little Light to be a unique, holistic space of self-discovery aimed at children.

Apps that inspired

Fleshing out the App: Features, Flows and Interactions

My Role: Product Manager in collaboration with the Little Light and Think Design
Tasks I undertook: Compiling requirements and concepts, sketching out modules and flows, directing the wireframing 
Tools used: Miro

At this stage, I worked closely with the Little Light team to scope out the features of the app aligned to the 4 focus areas discussed before:

1. Guided Learning Flow
2. Gamified Engagement
3. Personal Journey Inwards
4. Social Learning

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01 Guided Learning Flow

The Little Light Mascot

What is the role and nature of a Little Light Mascot? How does it interact with users?
Along with the team, I began imagining all the various possibilities of a guide/mentor/friend and the role such a figure can play in a child’s learning journey.

Coursing through the Little Light curriculum and its implementation, as well as our many team discussions, I compiled 3 main roles for the mascot:

Each role is mapped to specific forms of interactions envisioned for the app. Whether it is a free-flowing conversation with the child or a transition between modules or a helpful nudge, the mascot is able to adapt its form and nature to the need at hand.

With the role and function of the mascot fleshed out, how does this interaction feel like? We worked with Think Design, a UI/UX consultancy, to translate our ideas into wireframes. With their help, I was able to visualise the mascot’s various functions coming into effect.

The Little Light team and I mapped out the various intervention points for a mascot experience in the learning flow. Each day’s user journey was to begin and end with a mascot interaction, and each module was to be supported by mascot interaction before and after.

With these interventions in mind, we explored how screens with mascot interaction might look and feel like. Together with TD, we explored a ‘chat’ format for conversational UI where the mascot and child interact as if they were ‘chatting’ with each other.

At this stage, like the others, it was imperative to keep in mind that we were designing for children. To guide the wireframing process better, I dove into research around child-computer interaction.

Now that we know how the mascot interacts with the child, what does it look and feel like?

I began work on this when UI solutions by Think Design were not aligning with our vision. I onboarded a small team of talented people – an illustrator, an animator and a sound designer – to help bring our vision to life.

There were 2 main parts of this:

1. Mascot: How does the mascot appear?
2. Mascot Conversational UI: How does the mascot interact with the user?

Mascot Look and Feel

We imagined the mascot to be a source of light, joy, wisdom and compassion. Inspired by the Little Light brand mascot, I iterated on a child-like form representing a burning flame with playful animated postures and movements.

I worked with illustrator Keya Lall to refine the figure further. We also worked parallelly with animator Uma Sharma to bring it alive.

We iterated on the hair animation closely to create a sense of a vibrant and illuminating ‘flame’.

Mascot Conversation UI: I wanted to create a unique visual flow of mascot conversations with the child learner – one which is experiential, moves away from a standard chat UI and yet allows for scalability.

The key elements of a Mascot UI was the animated mascot figure, mascot text input and child text input. Some of the important metrics that helped us decide our direction forward were ease of use, readability and scalability.

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02 Gamified Engagement

The Learning Flow

The Little Light curriculum builds upon the Circle of Self – a unique pedagogical framework around discovering one’s self.

It is expressed through various modes of engagement such as animated stories, guided meditations, projects and daily practices.

How can we deliver these modules effectively on an online mobile platform?

Daily Learning Flows: One of our key research insights was that children were keen to learn something new every day. The Little Light team and I mapped short flows of interconnected modules that the child could interact with every day. A day’s session could include a guided meditation, a story video, and a daily practice – all exploring a chosen topic or concept.

We could have the freedom to build unique daily sessions for children.

Concept to Wireframes: We worked with Think Design to build the wireframes that interspersed Mascot UI with other video and activity modules.

Meditation Flow: A short module of meditation can be experienced this way:

From Screens to Spaces: With my team, I created a unique sensorial language for each module space – a combination of image, motion, and sound.

Helping children easily recognize where they are and what they need to do, could decrease overall cognitive load while providing a sense of familiarity.

How could we make children keep coming back for more?

Gamification: In addition to the base of daily learning flows, we created additional modules and interaction logic that would enhance the self-directed experience of learners. Based on principles of gamified learning, these encourage a sense of control over one’s own learning process.

Using the Octalysis framework of gamification (defined by Yu-Kai Chou), I mapped out the various opportunities for gamified learning in the app flow.

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03 Personal Journey Inwards

Who am I?

In an effort to have children see themselves on their learning journey, the team and I worked towards building a ‘Self View’.

Design Process

02 UI Design

My Role: UI Design Lead 
UI Team: Keya Lall (Illustrator), Uma Sharma (Motion Designer) and Ankit (Sound Designer)
Tasks I took up: Creation of UI templates, directing and managing UI asset creation, Brand alignment across app assets

Building the World of Little Light

The Little Light app became a natural space to expand the Little Light brand language through illustration, sound and motion.

Design System: Typography, Colour and Grid

Typographic Style: We primarily used the Sassoon Infant font family created specifically for young readers. The sans serif typeface is based on a simplistic handwriting style and has several features that make it optimal for digital screen reading for our target age of children.

Colour: Colours have a strong emotional affordance. Using the color theory and aligning with the brand’s look and feel, I have mapped various spaces of interaction on the app to a specific color combination. Whether it’s using calm blues to suggest a meditative space, or using bright oranges to create an active and curious space, every color element works to enhance its module purpose.

03 Prototyping

Stringing together different modules, I have worked on prototyping and testing different sessions. These become essential points of understanding with developers and other stakeholders.

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The app is under development as of now, slated for its first release in Oct 2023.