Squiggle Story App
Squiggle Story is an innovative educational app designed to help young children (ages 2-6) learn English as a second language through interactive storytelling and engaging video content without the need for reading or speaking. With a focus on simplicity and accessibility, the app allows children to easily initiate, manage, and end interactive calls, while providing parents with robust tools to select educational topics, monitor vocabulary growth, and track their child’s learning progress.
Role and Responsibilities
As a multi-disciplined Product Manager, I led the end-to-end development of SquiggleStory, encompassing UI/UX design, front-end and back-end coding, content creation, and comprehensive product management. My key responsibilities included:
UI/UX Design: Crafted intuitive and visually appealing interfaces using Adobe XD, ensuring a child-friendly experience while providing parents with accessible and informative dashboards.
Content Strategy: Developed a lexicon of essential English words, generated and validated scripts, and created localized bedtime stories to reinforce vocabulary acquisition.
Video Content Creation: Utilized Adobe Character Animator, After Effects, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro to produce high-quality animated videos. This involved designing characters and backgrounds, animating scenes, generating voiceovers, and editing videos to ensure engaging and educational content.
Technical Implementation: Built the app using React Native and Node.js, integrated AWS S3 for media storage, and utilized Contentful for content management, ensuring scalability and reliability.
Product Management: Defined the product roadmap, prioritized features based on user impact and development effort, and conducted user testing to refine functionalities and enhance user satisfaction.
Key Features
Interactive Storytelling: Generates personalized bedtime stories that reinforce vocabulary learned from videos, enhancing contextual understanding and retention.
Vocabulary Tracking: Provides detailed logs and analytics, allowing parents to monitor and support their child’s language development.
Parent Dashboard: Offers comprehensive metrics, including vocabulary heatmaps and progress gauges, enabling informed decisions to support educational goals.
Content Management: Organizes a diverse library of videos, stories, and vocabulary lists, ensuring balanced and engaging language exposure.
Compliance & Security: Adheres to COPPA guidelines, ensuring the safety and privacy of children’s data.
Goals and Impact
Squiggle Story aims to make learning English enjoyable and effective for young children by integrating educational content with interactive features. By providing parents with comprehensive tools to track and support their child’s progress, SquiggleStory fosters a collaborative learning environment that promotes sustained language development. The app not only enhances vocabulary acquisition but also builds a foundation for future language proficiency, making it a trusted tool for parents and educators alike.
Roadmap (WIP)
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
User Testing and Journey Mapping were used to identify key pain points and opportunities within the user experience.
The Feature Prioritization Matrix was used to strategically assess and rank app features based on their potential user impact and required development effort, enabling informed decision-making that maximized value and aligned with long-term product objectives.
The Information Architecture Diagram maps out how SquiggleStory App’s features and content are organized for both children and parents, ensuring easy navigation and effective content management.
Child UI: Simplified for ease of use, allowing young children to initiate, reject, and end calls effortlessly.
Parent UI: Comprehensive dashboard for monitoring vocabulary growth and managing content.
Global Features: Ensure consistency, security, and localization across all user interfaces.
Content & content metadata relationships were organized via Contentful to enable efficient content management, support localization, and ensure seamless integration with the app’s frontend, enhancing content discoverability and scalability.
The Systems Diagram illustrates the technical architecture of the Squiggle Story App, detailing the interactions between the React Native frontend, Node.js backend, Contentful CMS, AWS S3 storage, and integrated services to ensure seamless functionality, scalability, and robust content management
The User Flows Diagram maps out the essential pathways users take to accomplish key tasks within the Squiggle Story App, ensuring a seamless and intuitive experience for both children and parents
Adobe XD was used to iteratively design and prototype the UI/UX the Squiggle Story App’s interface, emphasizing user-friendly interfaces and child-centric aesthetics that enhance overall usability and engagement.
Screenflows for Parent and Child Users illustrate the step-by-step interactions and navigation sequences tailored to each user type, highlighting personalized experiences and streamlined workflows.
The Content Workflow Diagram outlines the step-by-step process of creating, validating, producing, and managing educational content for the Squiggle Story App, ensuring consistency, quality, and scalability.
Example
This is an example of a video watched in English and a bedtime storry - based on the video - narrated by the parent in Japanese.