Projects / iSTART Early Mobile
CompletediSTART Early Mobile: a mobile reading tutor for kids
1 / 6Every screen, in one spread.
- Product
- iSTART Early Mobile, a personal concept
- Role
- UX and UI design
- Team
- Nishad P
- Timeline
- Spring 2024
- Status
- Design exploration, in Figma only and never developed
- Built with
- Figma
- pen and paper
- ChatGPT and DALL-E
- Photoshop
A personal project. What would the student portal look like on a phone? Every student screen and flow, redesigned for mobile, with richer graphics and an AI assistant built in.
Parents can monitor progress.
Context
iSTART Early
A desktop tutoring system from ASU's SoLET Lab that teaches grades 3 to 5 five reading strategies (Ask It, Reword It, Find It, Explain It, Summarize It) through lessons, games and quizzes. As a designer at ASU's Learning Engineering Institute (LEI), I designed its teacher interface and made its student interface user-ready as a full portal.
Concept and work
Sketches. Pen-and-paper layouts.
Flows.
Screens.
Sign in Welcome, with Matty's first hello The dashboard The Ask It planet
Matty
The assistant's face. A student taps Matty on any screen for study help ("quiz me on this," "explain the lesson"), full screen or as a popup that can also reach the teacher.
An early DALL-E character sheet
The look
Space theme. Each strategy is a planet; Matty is a space mascot I made with ChatGPT and DALL-E.
The system.
Reflection
I designed this about two and a half years ago, when mobile apps were built as monolithic experiences. Today I still see it as a kid-facing design, but one whose UI and experience could be better. A lot has changed since then: AI is everywhere now, and UX expectations have shifted. If I designed it again, the games would stay, but lesson delivery, the quizzes and the iconography would all change.
One gap remains: I have no first-hand research on how kids use an app, so those choices rest on secondary research and my intuition.