General 4 — CHRISTINA LAFONTAINE

littleBits Space Rover Inventor Kit

The littleBits Space Rover Inventor Kit allows kids to build their own space rover, learn space facts, and provides challenges that prompt them to invent for a future living in space. The kit incorporates STEAM based learning and comes with a range of electronic bits, templates, and the littleBits app for an integrated connected play and learning experience.

My Role

As a Product Designer for littleBits, I was lead on the Space Rover Inventor Kit. I developed the kit from start to finish and was in charge of overall design, user experience, creation of modular templates, building play interactions & activities, and writing, filming, and directing a series of guided instruction videos for the littleBits App.

I also developed and implemented the user flow with Software and Product teams for delivering all video instructions, which was later executed in the apps for two additional kits that I worked on in the littleBits Inventor series.

Research

We went through several rounds of the iterative design process. We began with research into past and current space exploration. Then moved on to brainstorming, capturing all of our ideas through writing and drawing rough sketches.

Once we grouped and matched the ideas into categories, we narrowed them down to a handful and started building out some very rough prototypes to see what took shape and stuck.

Iterative Prototyping

I created some initial prototypes based on the feedback from out research and user interviews, and used those as our base point to continue to user test and iterate throughout our prototyping process.

Based on the feedback from our user testing sessions, I prototyped 10 unique project builds along with an activity for each build, ultimately creating up to 30 interchangeable connected play activities.

User Testing & Feedback

Once simple prototypes were made, another designer and I worked together to do a first round of user interviews and testing. We workshopped the concept, interviewed our target age range, and user tested the prototypes.

We took this feedback put it all back into our process, continuing to improve on our ideas and prototypes. User testing was an integral part of this complex prototyping process and we user tested with over 80 children ranging in ages as young as 6 to 12 years old at schools across New York City.

Instruction Set User Flow

From our user testing we found that kids wanted to build the templates and follow along with each activity, but they needed very clear instructions to accomplish the in app challenges. We realized we needed to come up with a unique way to deliver these instructions since we were dealing with an age range of kids at varied reading levels.

I took lead on this part of the project and developed the instruction and learning content user flow for the mobile app, wrote the copy for each step of the instructions, executed and directed hundreds of videos, styled video content to create a cohesive look and feel across the kit. This instruction set framework and user flow was used in the apps for the other two Inventor Kits in this series.

Final Product & Insights

The Space Rover Inventor Kit creates invaluable learning moments for kids, teaching them about space travel, guiding them through simple principles of electronics, providing multiple opportunities for hands on project based learning achievements, and gives them both an intuitive connected learning experience. The Space Rover Inventor kit was a 2020 Toy of the Year award finalist.