Kidstoria

The challenge

Most children's audio apps are built for daylight and for adults. They are bright, busy, and full of controls that assume a confident reader.

This one is used at bedtime. A white screen in a dark room is a problem, not a style choice, and 'tap the third item in the list' is not an instruction a five-year-old can follow.

The approach

The whole interface lives in a night palette, deep blue-green with a warm cream for type, so the screen belongs in a dark room instead of lighting it up. The illustration style does the rest: a starlit forest at the bottom of every screen, a moon, a child with headphones, and a hand-drawn cover for each story.

Those covers are the navigation. A pre-literate child recognises the fox, the whale, the castle; the title next to it is for the parent reading over their shoulder. Controls are sized to match: an oversized play button flanked by previous and next, and nothing else competing with it on the player screen.

Structure stays at four tabs (Home, Search, Collections, Favourite) because a child should be able to learn the whole app by accident. Search splits into History and Trends so the last story is one tap away, which is what actually gets asked for at bedtime.

Even the empty state is designed: an illustrated stack of books and a plain sentence explaining what will appear there, rather than a blank screen that reads as broken.

The outcome

A five-screen flow (splash, library, player, search and favourites) designed as one continuous illustrated world, prototyped end to end so the bedtime path could be tested at bedtime rather than at a desk.