The Little Gibbon Storybook project took an existing book and converted it into an widely accessible app. Adding audio, animal sounds, text highlighting and animation to the existing drawings we were able to enhance the user experience without loosing the feel and message of the original book.
We are delighted to bring The Little Gibbon Who Lost His Song to life through this storytelling app. The story was written, illustrated and voiced by the Borneo Nature Foundation team with some special friends. We have used our scientific discoveries as a basis for the story, giving you a glimpse into the lives of Borneo’s incredible wildlife and why we need to protect the rainforest.
The main goal of the Little Gibbon Storybook app was to bring education and awareness of the plight of the Borneo animals to as wide of an audience as possible. Based on the David Attenborough endorsed physical book my challenge was to convert it to a digital medium without loosing what makes this book so special.
The target audience was Indonesian children of the reading level X. With one of the main goals being to improve the awareness and education of the local indonesian communities it was essential to be able to present the text and audio of this app in Indonesian.
However deforestation and it’s effects are a global issue so it was important to also try and target an international audience too. So the app is also available in English text and audio.
The book is in two languages (English and Indonesian) so you can practice your language skills while journeying deep into the rainforest and meeting many forest animals. You can also explore the interesting facts and additional information provided within the app to learn more about these unique species. We have already fallen in love with Borneo’s wildlife, will you fall in love too?
To help reach the widest possible audience the app was primarily developed for the Android market as this consists of 74.6% of the worldwide mobile users. As a strong secondary goal the iOS market was also targeted as this reaches 24.8% of worldwide mobile users.
So the target audience was Indonesian and English speaking children of the reading age X using either Android or iOS devices.
In order to hit both the Android and iOS markets it was decided to develop from a single code base which could then be compiled to work cross platform. After a careful review of the frameworks available Ionic came out on top. Being able to develop in JS and HMTL/CSS allowed for rapid development time with the only learning curve being how to implement the ionic library in the best way.
The main advantage of choosing Iconic was the ability to use a combination of languages I was very familiar with.
In order to create an app for the iOS market without owning an iOS device to compile on I needed to use an external compilation service. AppFlow seems to offer this. I will update this section once I have attempted to create the iOS app.
One of the goals was to add some animation to the images. The images were created by XXX and were each lovingly hand drawn. The drawings are an essential part of the books message so I didn’t want to change them. But I did want to add some animation to them if this could be done in a respectful way.
To satisfy these concerns I decided to add a parallax effect to the images. To achieve this I painstakingly separated the images into appropriate layers. These layers where then stacked on top of each other and their movement was linked to that of the viewing device. Where possible I also animated a few other things such as each animals sound, the encroaching smoke, or their movement across the page.
To assist with the reading comprehension and listening skills goals I thought it would be a good idea to highlight each word as it was spoken. I go into more detail about how this was achieved in this blog post .
— Might delete this section —
Overall the project went very well. It was really rewarding working on such an important topic and having the chance to make a real difference. I was able to hone a lot of my skills and learnt a lot along the way
This section will be updated once user engagement has been measured
In the future we plan to add interactive games to the app to allow the users to learn whilst playing.