ROLE
COLLABORATORS
Ani Nguyen Le
Alan Raskin
SKILLS
Interaction Design
Visual Design
Prototyping
TIMELINE
6 Weeks
Aug-Sept 2024
THE CONTEXT
Stop motion animation has been around since the early 1900s, and is an excellent gateway to animation
Whether it is clay-mation in Wallace & Gromit, or cutout motion in South Park, or puppet animation from Coraline — chances are you've seen stop motion animation techniques come to life. Given the relatively simple way that stop motion animation is created, there is some much room for the animator to bring their own unique way spark joy. It's an amazing starting place to learn animation principles and learn motion design.
THE PAIN POINT
While mentoring kids in animation over the summer, we realized that stop motion apps are simply not designed for kids
During the summer, we gave kids the opportunity to create their very own stop motion animation movie by creating paper cutouts and filming it using a popular stop motion iPad app. However, the app was far more challenging for the kids to use than anticipated and created a major pain point and blocker for their creativity.
To understand the space better, we analyzed the existing stop motion animation apps, along with other ed-tech and creation tools for kids
We evaluated the strengths, weaknesses, content design, UX design, and potential opportunities for improvement in each of the apps. We also walked through the flow of each app, step-by-step, to understand the user journey, but from a kids perspective.
We mapped out pain points in existing stop motion apps – but from a kid’s POV
We broke down the journey of a kid using a stop motion app into three main parts and identified the main struggle in each phase.
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We narrowed in on 4-5th graders, because we learned that “kids” are not a monolith – there are a ton of nuances and unique challenges between ages
We conducted various user interviews with ed-tech designers, children, and parents to understand their perspective on the unique challenges that kids face with creative tools.
Experienced designers in ed-tech helped us identify important constraints
Working with kids to try current animation apps and talking to ed-tech designers from Duolingo helped us realize we must consider how constraints change with each age
How can we simplify a pro creation tool to be more accessible for kids?
The core principles that influenced each of our design decisions along the way
A Stop Motion Animation App for 4-5th graders that's designed to prevent drop-off
For kids, there's a million opportunities to swipe out and immediately go back to playing Roblox. We wanted to design a completely new animation app to help kids stay engaged and learn animation principles in a fun and simple way.
An inspiring and delightful place to start
When you open the iMessage app, the six widgets in your care package will reflect your most recent activities & inputs. It will draw relevant information from the Apple ecosystem like your Photos app (to show you're eating well), Apple Watch + Health (to show you're working out, sleeping well, + staying healthy), Calendar (flights, availability), and many more.
Solving the blank page problem by sparking your imagination
At the start of an animation project, a professional might brainstorm before opening up the camera, sketch out a storyboard, create a plan, and collect materials. But for kids trying it for the first time, they might not know where to start. They are immediately faced with a blank screen, and get stuck on what to create. Our prompt generator gives them a prompt to spark their imagination right at the start, but remains broad enough for them to fit whatever resources they have available.
Reimagining the classic onion skin technique in a way that guides the child's attention from one frame to the next
Previewing the entire screen of your previous photo can be disorienting and overwhelming. We use AI to only highlight the "main character" of the animation. This guides the child’s attention to the most crucial piece of information – the main character, instead of overwhelming them with an onion skin of the entire screen.
Step-by-step guided animation action library for when the child get stuck on what to do next
We created an action library that serves as a guide for your next few frames. In a moment of creative dryness, the action library will walk you frame by frame through an action and present an overlay on the screen to be used as a stencil.
One tap auto-preview for quick moments of reassurance along the way to see your progress
Seeing your work in real time as you create, instead of only at the end gives you confidence that you are on the right track. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be a project you’re proud of
An Epic Soundtrack for your work
A super simple way to take your work and celebrate your progress and creative adventure. This is another lightweight integration of AI, that enhances your work instead of replaces it.
Currently we’re scoping an MVP for the engineer we’re collaborating with
We're simplifying the app even further with our developer to bring an MVP to life, testing with 4-5th graders, and findings ways to add lots more delight and motion to the app. We are continuing to chat with ed-tech designers and learning lots more about the creative tool space.
Presenting to ed-tech designers at Duolingo
A few pieces of feedback from Karl @ Duolingo — how do you make the interface super expressive with motion — kids love that — and you have the opportunity to go 10x crazier? Barton from Spotify also mentioned — given kids low attention span — is there an opportunity to radically simplify this to 1-2 mechanics that a kid can play with to the point where this is just a fun camera toy rather than a more structured “video creation software”.
Curious to see more? Don't worry, we did a ton of exploring along the way…
If you'd like me to walk you through our process more in depth, feel free to reach out to me at erk004@ucsd.edu and I'd be happy to share more. Thanks for reading!
