As a group, we decided that the mix of “education” and “food” was an idea we wanted to experiment with further. We produced the following mind map on all the things we could think of relating to an app of this nature.

We toyed around with quite a few ideas, including healthy eating apps for adults, and an app that could find a recipe using an ingredient, from a photograph taken by the user of that ingredient. We eventually decided that we would target the app at children, and turn it into a game to encourage children to play it.

I created the following storyboard as a basis for our app, which was based on many of the ideas that we came up with and bounced off each other during our group sessions.

As it to be designed for children, I took inspiration from existing material aimed at children. It is particularly helpful that I have a preschool child that I can draw inspiration from. I observe the things he likes, his preferences and images/designs he is attracted to.

One of his favourite toys is the Mr Potato Head, a version of which was first distributed in the 1950’s. Young children are naturally and instinctively drawn to faces, and I wanted to exploit this in my app design. All the features are exaggerated to epic proportions, and infants and young children seem to really love this.

I also took inspiration from my son’s magazines, including the popular Bananas in Pyjamas franchise. The colours are also very bright, using a lot of primary colours and the font is very playful and rounded.

I’ve also noticed, everything is either illustrated or accompanied by an image. As in the example below, the list of ingredients isn’t just text; each element has a picture of the food item. I think it is important to not give children too much to read, as this will quickly lose their attention.