The design of our app continues to get solid positive feedback. Since design covers a whole bunch of items, we’ll start reviewing them one by one.
We’ve heard that kids find it super easy to navigate from categories to playlist to videos. That’s good to hear since this was our primary challenge. The coverflow design gets major ‘ooh ahh’ props. I still remember the day that Jonathan unveiled this feature in our beta test. My kids interest level in what I was doing shot up! (Jonathan likes ‘the reveal,’ so when he comes up with a great feature and surprises me with appearance, it’s time for a happy dance). Keeping the background dark helps the coverflow jump out nicely.
We also know that kids appreciate the lack of heavy text and random unnecessary figures on how many views, dates posted, name of person who uploaded it etc. They want the video and pretty much only the video. (Well, they also want the ‘next video.’ Our true playlist function, with auto advance, is so subtle that many users take it for granted when we present the next video.)
The font we chose for the titles is Market Felt. Unfortunately, the iPhone has only a limited number of built-in fonts and market felt was the most kid-friendly one of them all. We agree with many of you that would prefer something a bit jazzier. For the time being, our options are limited.
Colors? It seems like parents and kids are split on this one. Kids are fine with them. Parents have varied opinions from ‘just fine’ to ‘wish they were more toddler friendly.’ We decided on the blue mainly because we didn’t want a rainbow-y tone distracting from the colors and images we’d see in the thumbnails.
Category icons? Parents seems to want something a bit more ‘iPhone-like,’ while kids are fine with them This is another example of the challenge of designing products for kids : kids may be the exclusive users, but their parents are the purchasers and the reviewers. We’ll have to get back to this one, as the jury is still out.
In our next post, we’ll cover the design of the eye-catching splash-screen.
