Colorful

Creating inclusive youth communities with arts education
Timeline
Team
Awards
Context
48hr Design Spring
April 2023
Jayden Kang
Megan Phi
Amy La
William Han
UCI You-Belong-Here Designathon 1st Place
Intercollegiate Designathon with over 280 participants
prompt
Design your own digital application that fosters community and celebrates inclusivity.
Core Features
Colorful profides an accessible medium for younger students to embrace their creativity and empower them to champion + share their work.
Making your Space
Kids can get messy when creating or playing, and that’s okay! We wanted to embrace this and allow users to organize their spaces how they want it.
Guided Practice
+ Free Form
Creative tooling can be intimidating and the steep learning curve may not always be the most kid friendly. While our interface is pretty streamlined, our characters also lead guided practice sessions. But creativity also shouldn’t have any hard rules, which is where free-form comes in.
Explore creativity through engagement
Users can display their daily challenge creations on the Community Board. Encouraging kids to practice communication skills, they can add written captions or audio clips to their one-of-one pieces. By scrolling through other friends’ creations, they can feel inspired and motivated!
Personal gallery and badges
instead of hard metrics
Users can display their daily challenge creations on the Community Board. Encouraging kids to practice communication skills, they can add written captions or audio clips to their one-of-one pieces. By scrolling through other friends’ creations, they can feel inspired and motivated!
01 Project Kickoff
Understanding the Users
Since it was a rapid-fire design competition, we were not expected to conduct primary user research. We decided to gather information online and make use of existing research. Here were the main pain points that our target users, children with special needs, seemed to have:
Lack of community
Almost half of children with disabilities are excluded from the educational system, a stark contrast to the mere 13 percent of their non-disabled peers facing the same circumstance. This denial of their educational rights robs them of the opportunity to engage in their communities.
Lack of confidence
Children with learning disabilities suffer from low self-esteem because existing school-based learning programs are developed with a neurotypical child in mind. Children with limited mobility lose confidence when they struggle with performing tasks that are designed for the majority.
Disparity in access to art curricula
There is much disparity in access to arts-enriched curricula, with the most robust programs only being implemented in well-funded schools. 70% of parents with children with disabilities reported difficulty accessing arts programs and activities for their children. (Journal of Intellectual Disability Research)
With these pain points, we defined three main discovery pillars...
Community
Empowerment
Flexibility
With this, we created three potential user personas to guide our process in ideating our product.
Potential User 1:
Child with ADHD
  • Difficulty in sustained focus
  • Overwhelm with complexity
  • Frustration with lack of progress
Potential User 2:
Child with Limited Hand Mobility
  • Frustration with precision tasks
  • Struggle with manipulating tools
  • Difficulty in Fine Motor Control
Potential User 3:
Parent whose child is HoH
  • Wants their child to feel empowered
  • Needs a community to get advice from people who are also parents of a child who is HoH
02 Finding the gap in the market
How are competitors tackling the pain points?
Lingokids
Splash Learn
Drawing for Kids
Community
interactive lessons and collaborative games
community involvement is good, but emphasis is more on language learning than art-specific community building.
x
x
Empowerment
points and rewards based on achievement
according to our research, hard metrics stress users with learning difficulties
stars for achievement and progress tracking
having stars as rewards are good; progress tracking seems to be irrelevant for art creation
drawing levels and tiers; badges and certificates
showing levels and tiers can stress users if they are not making progress
Flexibility
allows to adapt to a child's pace and preferences
allowing users to select their preferences may be both empowering and accessible
allows to adapt to a child's pace and preferences
allowing users to select their preferences may be both empowering and accessible
users choose drawing topics and experiment art styles
encouraging creativity through providing flexibility!
03 opportunity
How might we create an accessible medium for younger children to embrace their creativity and empower them to champion + share their work?
We ideated some features that would address our objectives + fill the gaps of the market
Community
community board for parents
allowing student to share work
children responding to the same daily challenge / seeing others' work
Empowerment
don’t define when the artwork is “done”
awards + badges instead of hard metrics
personal gallery
Flexibility
free form or guided practice
board set up
voice or typed explanation
feedback forum
We organized feature ideas into a comprehensive information architecture.
04 USER TESTING AND ITERATIONS
Key design decisions
With our initial wireframes, we asked one another to perform certain tasks. Based on the performance and feedback, we made appropriate iterations.
1. Taking into consideration our two distinct user groups: children and parents
2. Eliminating stress of choice for users to focus on single content at a time.
3. Making the artboard intuitive by minimizing necessary functions.
Technical Considerations
Designing for iPad -> Multi-modal interactions
Micro-interactions and audio stimuli
Acknowledging continual improvement with a dedicated feedback forum
Parental lock/security
Guide characters to interact with users + assist in getting over the learning curve of tech
Awards/Badges when users achieve a certain streak
05 High fidelity Frames
Crafting the visual design to be friendly, intuitive, and accessible.
With our initial wireframes, we asked one another to perform certain tasks. Based on the performance and feedback, we made appropriate iterations.
Guide characters to interact with users + assist in getting over the learning curve of tech.
Playful characters talk to and interact with users as they are on their artistic journey!
Prioritizing WCAG 2.0 Color Contrast Compliance in Our Designs
We tested all our components with a color contrast tool to make sure that we are not hindering the user experience due to lack of color contrast.
Touch-Friendly Design
We adhered to WCAG's minimum target size requirement of 44 x 44px.
05 Future steps
Looking Forward and Measuring Success
How often are users sharing and creating work?
  • How often do they include written captions?
  • How often do these add audio clips?
  • Are they starting to open up more?
Are users becoming more proficient with Colorful?
  • Completing doodles faster?
  • Being less reliant on guided practice and doing more free-form?
How are parents interacting with Colorful?
  • What does engagement in the forum look like using testimonies to make gauge efficacy?
06 Reflection
Takeaways + Lesson Learned
Participating in my second-ever design-a-thon was an incredible experience! Working alongside a talented and diverse team - Will, Megan, and Amy - was an absolute honor!

Dealing with a sensitive topic, the initial ideas we brought in were raw and unpolished, but through open discussions and constructive feedback, we were able to refine and shape them into powerful concepts.
‍
The all-nighters, hours of discussion, and prototyping all payed off when we pitched our product and received first place! It was truly rewarding and I am incredibly grateful for my teammates!