NOTE: This experience was conceived of and developed within a 3-month "skunkworks" project framework, wherein I functioned as the Scholastic Client Partner and User Experience Director, in collaboration with a Creative (visual, UX, front-end dev) team from RoundarchIsobar (yes, I was lucky to hire my former colleagues as agency partners).
Our task was to envision innovative discovery and exploration tools (ideally optimized for tablets and gestural interfaces) to engage kids in finding and choosing their own books. The experiences we created were developed into a single proof-of-concept prototype which is currently in rounds of user testing and co-creative iteration.
A really big part of conceptualizing Book Pop! and Story Shuffle was digging into our taxonomy and book-tagging system, manipulating, stretching, and imagining ways to create custom blends that would deliver spot-on, but also surprising results. Kind of like creating a recommendations engine from scratch!
The creative and interactive concept for BookPop! was inspired by the stuff of a kids' life: secret diaries, SLAM books and MASH games, sketchpads, and sticker books (wait, do kids still collect stickers?) And let's not forget that one of Scholastic's flagship brands is Diary of a Wimpy Kid...
Here's an example of the taxonomy blends I created to map existing subject and genre tags to Mood, Interest, and Attention-span spectrums. This really is as insane as it seems.
