During this week I collected all my secondary research and put it in a padlet, this really helped with organising the research and also pinpointing some priorities for the app.
With the research, I gave myself some questions to remind myself and answer to help more with creating the AR experience
What are the target audience’s interests, and behaviours?
Interest
Through research and websites such as starting blocks.gov that highlight signs of child development, I found kids around this age tend to love toys, and animals, be creative, and show enjoyment in success such as getting answers or questions right.
Behaviours
Specifically for children with dyslexia, some children may show behaviour such as
- Difficulty learning to sing or recite the alphabet
- Difficulty keeping a simple rhythm
- Confused by letters which look similar, particularly b/d, p/g, p/q, n/u, m/w
- Difficulty paying attention, sitting still, listening to stories
- Poor auditory discrimination
From this, I was able to make two user personas Alex where I was able to narrow down some pain points/challenges this helped a lot as I felt like I was getting to know my users a bit more
From here I moved on to Ideation, I made a mindmap and placed all my ideas in one place trying to figure out what would be the main priority for the AR experience, but also trying to take into consideration limitations such as timing and coding.
Throughout this process, I had to keep in mind my users for example within the user’s personas Alex struggles with phonics awareness so audio cues of pronunciations of letters and words should be key. Furthermore teaching methods that I found through research such as the Orton–Gillingham Method used to teach children with dyslexia how to read focus on the connection between letters and their sounds, as a result, children can assign more meaning to the language and develop better overall comprehension, therefore the ar experience may best work revolving around this existing method of teaching to children with dyslexia.
Animations will make the ar experience more enjoyable but too many animations may be distracting and take away from the experience, for example, the user persona Sophia gets easily distracted so a small number of animations may be a good solution for this.
Another Idea was to include gamification of AR elements, while this idea could prove to be very beneficial I have to take into consideration timing as there are 26 letters and words to get through and also figuring out how this gamification may work (it sounds a bit difficult to code)
So after all the brainstorming, the main features of the AR experience will include
- will work using Alphabet flashcards
- overlay for letters
- an overlay objects /words
- Audio cues of pronunciation of words/letters
- small animated visuals that may come from the letters and words
I also believe not having too many features within the app will make this a bit more achievable and also make the learning journey less overwhelming. Something I should note is this process was all based on Secondary research, however, I am trying to see If I can gather my own primary research by reaching out to charities teachers/specialists at this point I have not found anyone yet, but I am still looking.