Company: Cedar Fort
Industry: Book Publishing
Role: Product Designer / iOS Developer
Project objective: Build an interactive iOS app for kids with illustrations from a book previously published by Cedar Fort.
Language & Tools: Swift 2.3, SpriteKit, Photoshop
After meeting with Cedar Fort about improving a previously built iOS app, the decision was made to create an all new app that would be an interactive experience with one of their books. I was tasked with pitching the apps functionality and features. I came up with a comprehensive list that we could use to determine what the game should include. Once the options were narrowed down, I began designing the interaction.
The objective of the game would be to help kids learn how to read and sound out words. The functionality to achieve that would be “finish the sentence with the correct word”.
Process: Using the book the app was to be modeled after, I designed each screen on a whiteboard with the exact interaction that it would contain. After the interaction was solidified, I began the process of writing the application.
Problems and Solutions: Being a new developer I ran into a few problems that I had to solve on my own. One of those problems was figuring out how to get a word to both stick to a certain part of the screen as well as trigger confetti to fall when the correct word was chosen. After attempting multiple different ways to achieve this interaction I found that I could have the confetti falling behind the view at all times. When the correct word is chosen, that would trigger the current view to disappear to expose the confetti view behind it.