Read to kids
Pre-pilot research project to help Worldreader set up ground for a pilot program in New Delhi, India
Worldreader’s Mobile Reading to Children programme aims to encourage parents and caregivers to read to and with their young children by giving them access to a digital library of high quality, locally relevant children’s books via their mobile phones.
The Read to Kids pre-pilot study looked at understanding reading behaviour, media consumption, decision influencers, and interaction with the existing portal within a specific group of respondents. Based on the study, a re-design of the app was suggested.
4 months; My roles: design research, visual design, user experience design; Done for Worldreader through Vihara Innovation Network; Team: Pallavi Mahajan, Insha Riaz, Emily Kenny, Ruma DhingraChallenges
On field recruitment for a ‘representative’ sample was challenging. It was easier to find female respondents compared to male respondents. Debriefing after each interview made us conscious about defining quality of respondents response — we often saw some male respondents not taking the interview seriously and ‘playing the fool’ while talking to us. This could have been because we were a women only team — which made we wonder how would the dynamic shift with the presence of male researcher.
Suggested redesign
Key opportunity areas
Users know the kind of content they are looking for (bilingual stories, more images and short pieces of text with simple words).
Users are looking for a simple reading experience, which enables them to sit with their child and ensure that they learn something new.
Most of the users are unaware about the advantages of reading from a mobile platform. (Introduction of features like bookmarks, saving books for offline reading, reading tips.)
Feature and priority mapping
Feature: Reading a book
Feature: Saving a book
Research process
Low resource setting usability testing
Intensive field recruitment, key informant interviews & focus group discussions
Analysis & synthesis across large amounts of data
What’s next?
The pilot programme kicked off on the 4th of April, 2016 along with three implementing partners, Katha, SARD and HLFPPT (the partners were determined through understanding key activation nodes). This one year long pilot aims outreach to a larger audience by basing their individual programmes on the findings of the pre-pilot. Workshops were conducted with each partner by CKS to help them understand the situation on field and to prevent them from facing the same problems that were faced during the pre-pilot.
While the pilot of the programme begins, one must remember that this application is only a tool to overcome the deficiency of books. The essential aim of the Read to Kids project is to promote a love of reading amongst the masses and hence increase school readiness. One must try and look at this project with a lens ten years ahead of time. What change are we trying to envision within the society we live in? Is our oral culture shifting towards text? The vision is what holds importance.