WINNERS 2021

Maneno is a fun interactive reading app for parents and young children designed to inspire kids to read. Since our task was to harmonize the product's visual style by adding brightness and childlike expression to it, the team literally got a chance to turn back to their childhood and take a look at the app design with their own naive but curious eyes. This experience helped us realize that nothing makes an overall impression of children's books more epic than fantasy characters. That's why we added a handful of gamification to the app by creating a little blue Maneno dragon. This cure friend encourages children to read through different gaming techniques and interactions: speed reading tests or quizzes (for answering them, the user gets coins and can feed the dragon or buy him fashionable clothes and accessories). A child can get assistance along the reading way if he/she encounters any difficulties with words or phrases and receives book recommendations according to his/her reading level and interests. The fantasy world-related theme helped us develop an island metaphor, which symbolizes the inner world of a reader. We wanted to show — the more we read, the richer our inner word becomes. We demonstrated that the same thing happens to the island — new vegetation, rivers, waterfalls start to appear as the island grows bigger and becomes more beautiful. We used lots of colorful elements to make the child's immersion in the literary world exciting and vivid. The app contains many screens, where the dragon communicates with the child, gives him hints, and shows the fascinating Land of Books. In our design, we also wanted to convey the idea that reading opens the boundaries of new worlds and provides an opportunity to develop communication skills — since the application allows you to chat and follow the reading progress of your friends and their dragons. All our efforts and holistic design approach helped to make Maneno more than just a library but an edutainment-app with thoughtful integration of books and gamification designed to make the process of learning to read an engaging journey for all.