Do You Know How to Make a Friendship Bracelet?

For this project, I was tasked with redesigning the instruction sheet for a friendship bracelet maker kit.

These were the main objectives:

Make an instruction sheet that kids can understand without too much, if any, adult help.
Design something that makes sense for people who prefer to learn with words or with visuals.
Fit within the Choose Friendship branding guidelines and promote brand loyalty.

Design Thinking Process

Empathize

In this stage I tried to get to know the audience better. Though the main buyer of this product is adults, the primary users are kids/tweens. To research the target audience, I looked into color preferences, language and slang words, learning styles, and friendship bracelet industry norms and standards.

Define

Here are a couple of interesting things I defined in this part of the process:

1. Kids don't like feeling like they need to be babied.

2. People want visuals that make sense even without supplementary words and vice versa.

3. Clarifying details can make things even more confusing for people if they are not formatted in a straightforward way.

Ideate

The ideation stage is one of my favorites because there is no wrong answers! To think outside the box, we experimented with illustrations instead of images, a combination of diagrams and written steps, changing vocabulary, having an introduction section to explain potentially new terms, and overall page formatting.

Prototype

Prototyping helped me to get a feel for how the instruction sheet would look and feel for our users. During this stage, it became very clear whether our ideas were right for this design or if we needed to go back to the drawing board. There was definitely some very successful ideas and some that quickly returned to the ideation stage.

Test

Even though the design was coming along great, the user testing brought up many valuable ideas that helped me rethink the current instruction sheet. I enjoyed getting to revisit other steps in the design thinking process to take a user's simple comment into really amazing improvements.

Stages of Design

Where I Started

This is the old instruction sheet. It was hard to understand (especially for kids) because it didn't use relevant photos, was too wordy, and wasted valuable space with things that don't matter to the user.

Results

After this successful instruction redesign, kids are able to learn how to make a friendship bracelet without any adult help! The instructions empower the user, giving them confidence to try making more complex bracelets from the additional tutorials found on the Choose Friendship website.