kid again: play dress up and satisfy your inner child
a branding and UX/UI case study
kid again is a costume app that helps users find a unique costume at any time of the year. The app filters out your preferences and formulates costume ideas based on your event type. Whether you are going to a Halloween party or murder mystery dinner party — we have you covered! With kid again, you can play dress up and satisfy your inner child at the same time. Have fun!
The Problem
As an avid Halloween fan, I love dressing up, but as the years go by, I have less and less time to find and make a unique costume in time for parties and events. I always want a costume that makes me feel good and is super distinctive and special, but scrolling through BuzzFeed listicles and Pinterest never seems to work. I see the same ten costumes repeated over and over and most costumes are poorly crafted costumes from Party City. There’s nothing wrong with buying a store-bought costume, but sometimes I want something a little nicer or I want to make my own. I would love to be able to sort these costume ideas by event, price, time spent creating it, and by all sorts of other preferences.
During the research phase of the project, I found many other issues surrounding Halloween and costuming, but I decided to focus on creating a unique costume app experience. There were very few costume apps already on the market, and the apps were lackluster and difficult to use.
Research
To start the research, I began brainstorming ideas for the content of the app — i.e. what problem would the app solve? I decided to consider two problems I experienced when celebrating Halloween. One issue I faced was that I always wanted a unique costume for the holiday, but searching the internet was tedious and never helpful. Another problem I faced particularly this year was that it was difficult to celebrate Halloween during a pandemic while social distancing.
I began to jot down everything I could think of with both issues in mind on digital sticky notes.
Narrowing Down on a Concept
When celebrating Halloween during a pandemic, parties and trick or treating were no-nos. Parties included bobbing for apples and close quarters; the urge to be physically near another party-goer is just too much. I came up with other ideas like watching Halloween movies together or pumpkin carving with your “Bubble”, but these ideas seemed too simple and difficult to implement in a successful app. Similarly, centering Halloween during a pandemic was too focused to be a profitable app.
When choosing a Halloween costume, there were too many costume recommendation sites and they frequently posted the same costumes! It was also difficult to filter by theme, price, or type of costume (couples, singles, etc). These sites also lacked unique (and ingenious) ideas that would impress anyone who saw the costume. Instead, these sites repeated the same superhero and movie costumes every single year with little originality. In discussions with colleagues, I decided to generalize the app to include all holidays and costumes, as Halloween was too niche for an app to be used year-round.
I also researched competitor costume apps and noticed that the few that existed were difficult to use, bland, and were nothing more than image gallery pages or boards. The photos used in the app were poorly rendered and photographed, and weren’t cohesive. These apps lacked filtering features, so I was left to scroll and scroll for hours.
With this in mind, I decided to create a general costume app that would include filters based on preferences set during an onboarding quiz, beautiful photography gallery pages, and a shop page. The app would filter images based on criteria such as uniqueness, affordability, whether the user would make or buy the app, and much more.
User Personas
In order to design the app with a specific customer in mind, I needed to design a user persona. I based the user off of my experiences finding unique costumes and the experiences of college students I know as well.
Dawn is a student who wants to be unique on Halloween while remaining sustainable and finding a costume that fits her busy schedule. She hates when costumes are repeated over and over online and when people buy a costume they'll only wear once.
Branding
I then began to work on the branding, starting first with the name. I wanted something that would highlight the youthful spirit of the app without being cliché or cringy. I started a word map, jotting down every word that reminded me of costumes or Halloween or clothing. “kid again” perfectly described the feelings I experience when I wear costumes on Halloween or for other events.
I began sketching thumbnail drawings of logo ideas to complement the name. Then, I played around with the youthful party hat and a bold word mark but finally settled on a design of a young-looking girl wearing a fun party hat (logo 1). I liked the playfulness of the smiley face and pigtails and the sketchy style of the mark.
The Final Logo
With this in mind, I edited the mark a bit more and decided that it would work best as the larger logo mark, but a smaller more concise party hat icon would work for the responsive mark.
The mark is appropriate for all ages (that are young at heart at least!) and is modern, approachable, but also fun! I loved that the mark would take the customers back to when they were kids dressing up for parties, which was something I wanted my users to experience with my app. I also liked that the logo de-centered Halloween, and focused instead on parties and costumes in general.
Style Research
To work on the style, I researched color palettes and design work and created two mood boards of styles that I thought might work for the app. My colleagues were interested in the fun sketchy illustrations of the inner child option, but they loved the type-focused modern style as well. I decided to merge the two rather than focus on one style as both styles would be strong together.
Brand Attributes
With the style in mind, I determined the brand attributes. I wanted the brand to be fun, playful, youthful, modern, bold, minimum, and confident.
Final Style
The brand identity mixes solid, structural, and bold rectangular shapes with soft sketchy linework illustrations. The interface is eye-catching with colorful and bright imagery and photographic color overlays.
The brand uses a graphic font like Objektiv Mk1 in both regular and Italic XBold styles for body copy and headers.
UX/UI
The user experience and user interface is very important when designing a successful app.
App Function
Earlier in the research phase, I had consolidated my concept and narrowed in on the app’s function. The app sorts costumes by various preferences from the information gathered via the onboarding quiz. Rather than focus strictly on Halloween, the app references different holidays and events for the costumes.
User Flow/Card Sorting
After the research and design phase, a UX/UI designer will sketch out possible user flows and journeys for the hypothetical user to take. It is important for the user to have a problem-free experience without hassles and poor experiences. I first had friends and family card sort the site map and app content to find the best arrangement of the information and facets of the app. I then created various user flows and paper prototypes for the app. After critique, I synthesized the best features of the prototypes into one flow. I looked at similar filter sorting apps like Daylio, a quick daily journaling app, and Instacart, a grocery delivery service, to decide where to place certain functions of the app and what the interface would look like.
Prototyping
A low-fidelity wireframe (see below) helps me see any flaws in the prototype without focusing on the design. I changed the save button from an upload symbol to a heart to make the design more fun. Next, I also removed the logo from the header because I found that it was not necessary. Centering the screen content on the pages made the visual screens look unintentional, awkward, and asymmetrical. Instead, I aligned the information by height.
High-Fidelity
After locating flaws in the interface and user flow, I began filling out the prototype and created the high-fidelity wireframe. After some helpful critique, I added lavender outlines to create visual separators in the app to make the design easier to read and understand, similar to Instacart or Apple interfaces. I also compared my brand colors on the accessibility color test to see if they were readable and made changes to reflect the visual contrast issues. Next, I added a final call to action on the costume instruction page. The user is recommended to share their costume on Instagram while tagging @ kidagain on the post.
Final App Design
Finally, we have the final app design! Enjoy!
Credits
Design: Heather Marshall
Art Direction: Courtney Spencer
Categories: Branding, UX/UI
Creative Timeframe: August to December 2020
School: Tyler School of Art and Architecture; Graphic and Interactive Design
