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Accomplish Reading Program helps students become better readers by helping them learn to concentrate on specific details.
Students develop the reading strategies necessary for comprehending sentences and paragraphs. The program helps students transition from reading fiction stories to the more difficult task of reading specific information. Accomplish Reading promotes comprehension monitoring, a metacognitive reading skill. |
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Jane Offutt, Ph.D. Reading Specialist, investigated comprehension monitoring in her dissertation: "Activating Children's Metacognitive Reading Processes," which inspired her to create an application called "Accomplished Reading" in 2014. I'm helping Jane with the design of her Splash Screens for the app.
The goal of this project was to create engaging visuals that would encourage kids to continue reading and learn from the program. |
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High Interest Books for Grades 4-8
"Wide reading" or "Reading for fun" builds good reading and learning habits because it gives students the experience of reading quickly and automatically. One of the keys to reading quickly and automatically is to provide readers with books that read fast and are hard to put down. "Wide reading" also expands a student’s knowledge base which makes future learning easier.
Research has found that the amount of reading done by a student positively correlates with high academic achievement. It’s important to help students "fall in love" with books. It helps them develop automaticity and a deep knowledge of subjects that interest them. With the research I gathered, I started to look up books that Grades 4-8 would be reading, and the type of artwork and font used on popular book covers. I used this for inspiration for the design of the splash screen. |
USER PERSONASAfter researching about the target audience, I decided to create a user persona for Jane Offutt. My goal was to create a realistic representation of our key audience prior to designing.
The application is directed towards students in grades 4-8 concentrating on reading tasks. |
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A splash screen is a graphical control element consisting of a window containing an image, a logo, and the current version of the software. A splash screen usually appears while a game or program is launching.
I was assigned to create two splash screens. The first splash screen would be the homepage of the application, while the second splash screen would appear at the end of the lesson. The screen will say, "Way to Go!" and report the user's score for that lesson. Her goal was to find a creative way to isolate the logo and put it in a format that could be inserted into that line of programming where the end of each lesson occurs. |
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After researching books for kids from age 9 to 14 and analyzing the artwork that motivates them to read, I started to design with the user in mind.
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The goal of the main page is to draw attention to the user using the new logo as inspiration. The original page was outdated and the information was hard to read for most users due to the busy background that was overlapping some of the text. My job was to design a new page that's clean yet engaging for kids.
With that in mind ,I decided to use the ray of sunshine for the background to compliment the logo. I also took out colors from the logo that would enhance the information. |
New Logo
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After the first iteration and some comments from our interviews, we noticed that the apple seems to divert the viewer's eye away from the focal image of the kids jumping As a result, we eliminated it to bring more focus to the logo.
Since we decided to get rid of the apple, I went back to re-align the page. Overall, the page needed a few slight adjustments. It performed well during the testing. |
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Testing Application with New Homepage
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Jane used a prototype of her application and inserted different homepages to test the newer version and observe how the kids would react to the change.
Most enjoyed the new color scheme and noticed the logo, unlike the other design with the apple. We decided to do a different testing method for the ending splash screen. |
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The splash screen I created for the end of every lesson was a great success. For testing purposes, we changed the colors of each splash screen to see which page got the highest response rate. We also noticed the images that kids enjoyed the most was a trophy, since it signified a reward. With this feedback in mind, we made some adjustments to create a successful ending splash screen page.
The splash screen above was the one that kids enjoyed the most. |
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We got rid of the apple on the homepage splash screen in order to bring more attention to the logo. When we tested it again we noticed more people commenting on the logo and what they liked about it. We also got rid of the sun burst background of the splash screen. While Jane liked the motif of the sunburst background for the homepage splash screen, the developer preferred a solid background color to make it easier to adjust the size for other platforms.
Jane ended up using the original design of the splash screens for her website. The ending splash screen was edited for portrait, landscape and other platforms where the app is available for download. |
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Final Splash Screen Homepage
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Final Splash Screen Ending
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Parents and teachers can help every student experience reading success by downloading "Accomplish Reading" from the Apple Store to the family iPad or to the classroom iPad. One download accommodates up to 20 students, which makes it ideal for family use or for the classroom Learning Center.
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