Toymail Redesign — Case Study

Ewa Śniecińska
Sep 4, 2018 · 4 min read

Creating new visual style for Toymail App

About app

Toymail app works with Talkies by Toymail. They are a breakthrough simple way to let kids voice chat with friends and family, without putting them in front of a screen. With Talkies, kids as young as 3 yrs old can send voice messages just by pushing a button. Messages are immediately sent to parent-approved contacts.

My task

My job was to create refresh look of the app and rebuild problematic part of the app like toy setup process while minimizing developers effort. Because of that most of that, I had to make some compromises. Later on, we (I and CEO of Toymail) started to design a new part of the app called Toymail Cloud.

Creating a new visual style

UI of the first version of the app didn’t age very well. I wanted to make the interface cleaner, but still, have some elements that remind users that Toymail is all about kids.

The first version of the app was designed without any kind of design system there was a lot of inconsistency (different font sizes, 54 shades of grey etc.). So I started by building a simple design system.

First I designed atoms — the smallest building blocks like colors, typography, icons etc. Those are all elemets that can’t be divided into smaller parts. Then I built bigger elements like molecules and organisms. Examples below ;)

Colors
Typography — Brandon Grotesque everywhere
Icons
Switches & buttons
Inputs
Rows for every type of the list
Navigation bar

Working on user experience

Fixing toy setup process

Most of calls and e-mails to customer service were related to toy setup process. There is A LOT resons why setup can fail and previous flow was making whole process even more confussing. I was testing diffrent version of setup with diffrent target groups staring from parents and older sibling ending with grandparents.

Making app COPPA compliant

As Toymail target kids under age of 13 app has to compliance Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). One part of requirements concers parental consent. After long research we decited to create knowledge-based questions that would be difficult for anyone under age of 13 (FFC accept this method in 2013). Before that app used credit card as a form of parental consent. This method took much more time and was a frequent reason for customer complaints

Creating Toymail Cloud

Toymail Cloud is subscription-based “platform” inside Toymail app. It’s app store for Toymail toys. At this moment there are 24 apps in Toymail Cloud like Waketime where you can set an alarm for your kid or Lullaby where your kid can get a daily lullaby delivered right to his Talkie.

“Default” design for Cloud app

Most of Cloud apps use the same schema, one of exception is Reminder app (flow below).

Example — Remiders App

Toymail Cloud -> Reminders

Download

You can find final app in App Store and Google Play.

Ewa Śniecińska

Written by

UX/UI Designer and Android developer

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