Market Research & Competitive Analysis

I began the research process by conducting market research on the children’s education space as a whole, starting with the similar Britannica school product and including sites like Nat Geo kids, BrainPOP and Kids Discover.

I also did research more generally on best practices designing for children, reading through a number of resources such as the Nielsen Norman group’s research which informed the UX of the platform.

We regrettably were unable to perform any primary research on children, though we had plans to perform user testing with a prototype right before the project was shut down.

Sketches

I sketched out preliminary versions of the main pages in order to start to solidify layout and features, while envisioning where how child users would interact with the site.

Wireframes

Using my sketches and sitemap, I then created wireframes of the platform screens I would need to based on the requirements. You can see a sample of my wireframing work below.

Hi-Fidelity Designs

With feedback from the rest of the team, I moved forward to create higher fidelity designs, building a library of components and styles along the way which would become a design system. I also created a prototype using XD which would have been used for in person testing with children of Britannica employees.

Next Steps

• If the project had gone forward, user testing would have led to refinement and finalization/handoff.

Reflection

This was the first project I had sole design ownership over at Britannica, and though I wished we had more time and resources for research, I felt I worked well within the constraints and learned a lot about designing for kids, an audience I never thought I would have to design for.