Tinitell

Happy talking

Tinitell is a venture capital-backed tech company based in Stockholm. It’s value proposition is to create simple, smart and fun wearables for kids.

The challenge

Create wrist phone with a fun and seamless experience for children, as well as a simple and focused app for the parents to keep track of their kids.

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Time travel to childhood

This project was the most challenging and yet also the most exciting and most fun one I have worked on. I have always wanted to design products for kids because:

1. Kids see the world differently - they have a different lens, logic and attitude vs. adults, which heavily influence how they perceive and interact with their surroundings.

2. Interactions that seem obvious to adults can prove to be challenging for kids.

3. The overall design process has to use a simple and easy to understand language.

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‍Big experiences for small people‍

Tinitell’s product team had one obsession, apply CCD (Child Centered Design) approach throughout the entire process of the creation of Tinitell.

Research has been the core element where everything revolves around. We were conscious that without involving users in the design and development process, chances are that the product wouldn’t match the needs, expectations and abilities of our users.

Children have different expectations for a products’ visual appearance, and interactions that seem commonplace to adults can prove challenging for kids. For example, kids might not fully understand how to interact with an interface; they might miss out on a lot of fun features, or they don’t get hooked to the product, because the design doesn’t match their level of experience and expectations.

This will eventually show in the user reaction to the final product, and therefore as a product team we won’t know where to find valuable output and affordance during our research.

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We conducted participatory design sessions, to gain knowledge of our users and of the product in different context of use, with the objective of creating a delightful experience for both children and parents.

One of the most important findings from these sessions, is that we were able to indetify two different segments of our users(3-5 yo and 6-8 yo kids0 with varying perspective, logic and needs.

“I want to monitor my 3 and 6 y/o children at all times”

“Keep it focused — Basic features, for basic users”

“It’s time to move away from the dual gender colours (pink & blue)”

‍Artefacts

Like with every digital mobile app, we started by analysing the outputs from the design sessions with our users, children and parents. Having identified users needs we set up the onboarding process:

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Next thing is defining the information architecture for app navigation.

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The sketches below were the first wireframes drawn during the design sessions with children and their parents, where one of the tasks was to identify their needs and expectations considered the hardware limitations.

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‍Visual direction

The design sessions were also very insightful when it comes to defining the visual direction of the product. We first set up a mood board with two distinct colour palettes, where one the first approach contained pastel colours, and the second one had solid colours.

To our surprise children and parents chose the same colour palette. For parents we heard the same reason, moving away from the dual colour (pink-blue). With kids was different, as these users might have trouble verbalising their thoughts, we had to focus on their facial expressions, body language, and behaviours when they were interacting with that task.

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‍Unboxing the delightful experience

Having most of the ingredients, prototyping was a fun game, where the team was free to experiment with different shapes, colours, textures, materials, and so on. Iteration was the key world for the whole design process, and below the results.