Case Study: JellyTelly
Helping JellyFish Labs envision the future of a children’s video platform.
How we helped: Field research and observation, design strategy and documentation.
JellyTelly is a children’s video platform serving Christian-oriented content, created by Phil Vischer (creator of Veggie Tales) and JellyFish Labs, in partnership with Focus on the Family. The site aims to deliver a wide variety of programming to children that is relevant and engaging, bringing faith to life through entertainment.
JellyFish Labs asked Madera Labs to help them think through how to envision the second iteration of JellyTelly. The goals were ambitious, but clear: recast JellyTelly as a network for a wider variety of programming, create an engaging and meaningful experience for children, and support discovery of content and affinity for the characters.
Our work began by seeking to understand the group that JellyTelly serves. To help foster empathy and understanding for these users, Madera Labs went out into the field to observe children as they consumed video and gaming content online, learning about their habits, preferences and latent needs. This work helped the team establish some guidelines for how to craft an experience that allows children to easily consume content while catering to their specific usage scenarios. This observational information became the cornerstone of conversations throughout the project, helping to drive countless decisions and design strategies.
After developing this empathy and understanding through observations, we went to work designing the next iteration of JellyTelly. We worked with JellyFish Labs to identify content and establish meaningful hierarchies, allowing us to design “discovery moments” into the website, while retaining a clear structure to aid users in content recall on subsequent visits. This tension between discovery and recall became a framework for the application design. Along with this motif, we iterated through options for extending engagement in the application, including areas for children to interact with one another, ways to share content and a structure designed to foster an immersive experience in the media.
During the project, we worked with a multidisciplinary team who worked to execute the design strategy, including the visual design, copywriting, management and coding.
The resulting redesign was a drastic departure from the original JellyTelly platform, and enables JellyFish Labs to achieve much greater scale while delivering a consistent and engaging experience for their audience.
JellyTelly launched their redesign in early 2011.
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