Designing a distraction-free learning app
on e-ink: A case study on UX for kids
The Challenge
Building a kids app design that values focus over screen time
Most modern kids app design are built to hold attention. Bright flashing colors, exploding animations and relentless notifications celebrate every tiny tap. Scribbi's founders wanted the opposite and brought us a clear product vision: a paper-like learning device for children aged 3–10, built on premium e-ink hardware that trades the noise and consumption of a typical tablet for handwriting, creativity, and focus.
The challenge was translating that vision into screens. Making a learning app engaging enough that a child loves to pick it up but can put it down without a meltdown, making AI feel safe and regulated for young minds, and designing the controls parents rely on behind it.
Our Goals
Creating a healthy, intentional
design for children
We set out to prove that a kids' app could be genuinely useful without being compulsive. That meant a few design commitments:
Design around how children actually develop
Age 3 and age 11 are completely different cognitively. Since this was an MVP, we needed a single shared interface rather than separate builds, which led us to a common layout that could flex across age bands, simple enough for pre-literate kids, yet mature enough that older kids never felt it was childish.
Cut every hook
No streaks, badges, or notifications designed to pull kids back. We eliminated any interaction or animation that could cause sensory overload. Feedback should stay calm, encouraging and intentional.
Make the work the reward
What they made, learnt, felt became the reward, a story they wrote, a drawing they sketched, an adventure they built with the character they chose.
Give parents control without making kids feel restricted
While parents get progress tracking, AI approval gates, and real decision-making power, the kids’ experience should feel open and free to explore.
Product Strategy
The decisions that shaped our UX design for children
Designing for the canvas: How we handled the technical limits of e-ink UI design
E-ink behaves nothing like a tablet screen: slow to refresh, muted in color, unable to carry the motion most kids' apps lean on. We designed for it.
It swallows saturation, so we retuned the entire palette, pushing color exactly where the screen drained it, to keep everything legible and warm without losing the calm, paper-like feel.
The slow refresh ruled out animation entirely: no motion, no flashing, nothing to work around. What looked like a hardware limit was our principle made physical, a screen that stays still is a screen that doesn't overstimulate.
AI Image Generation: Setting clear rules so visual content stays safe and consistent
Every adventure a child creates leans on AI-generated visuals to bring the story to life, which risks jarring, inconsistent imagery that breaks the experience.
So we defined a signature look, gentle, dreamy, soft-edged, then turned it into a reusable kit of prompt keywords and art-direction rules the dev team can follow to keep every thumbnail feeling like Scribbi.
The rules held it together: main character always centered, backgrounds never distracting, the same calm feel every time. The AI brings the freedom; our art direction sets the guardrails.
Child-Safe AI Design: Turning a raw chatbot into a friendly learning companion
Scribbi's biggest advantage is its AI-native flows, including an exploration page where kids ask curious questions, all regulated by parents. But you can't just drop a chatbot in front of a child.
So we reframed the AI as a conversation with the child's learning buddy, a character they pick at setup, gave it a wand icon, and wrapped it in storytelling: not "AI," just a bit of magic a child already understands.
With every answer routing to a parent for approval first, the experience stays delightful on the surface, controlled underneath.
The Solution
Keeping apps for kids engaging without using addictive features
Our ethnographic findings directly informed the design of targeted, role-
specific solutions each
addressing a distinct operational pain point.
The Homepage: Keeping things simple so kids can start learning immediately
The homepage holds just one idea, learning adventures, and one action, to start a new one. Two icons sit in the corner; everything else is the child's world to step into, so a child moves straight from opening the device to learning. Each adventure carries its own progress bar and trophy, so a child knows where they left off and a parent can check at a glance.
The quietest decision stays in the words: when a child generates their own adventure, a parent sometimes has to approve it first. Instead of "waiting for approval," the card reads "Finding path…", so the child never feels stopped, just that the adventure is already on its way.
The Adventure Page: Using recognizable pictures instead of confusing back buttons
Each learning adventure began with a story the child could read or listen to. In the page that followed it, the focus was on a visually recognisable set of quests the child could go on. We kept the story visible at the top of the activities page, the same image, the same title, so a child who wants to revisit it just taps the story itself instead of looking for a back button.
Each activity carries its own icon too, so a child recognizes what's science, what's coloring, without reading a word.
Handwriting Calibration: Turning a boring setup process into a fun roadmap
The calibration process was long and quite a load for kids in our target age group. So, we broke the whole process into checkpoints and drew them as a roadmap the child travels. “Complete till step D” and “Yayy!!! you reach a checkpoint”. Each checkpoint served as a sense of achievement and as a break that offered two options: keep going or come back later. This lowered the mental load of a big task and turned the calibration into a trip worth finishing.
Inside an Activity: Designing around resting hands and writing with a stylus
This is where the child writes, draws, and learns, so everything else had to get out of the way, just two icons up top: back, and a check to mark the activity done. That placement solves a specific problem too: kids rest their palms on the screen as they write, and controls up top with a roomy canvas mean a stray hand never triggers a mistap.
Feedback stays just as clear. At the end of each activity, color-coded responses show right from wrong at a glance, backed by gentle, guiding language rather than being blunt, so every child knows where they stand and what to do next.
The Parent Dashboard: Giving parents clear data at a glance
The child's interface was about removing the unnecessary; the parents was about organizing the necessary. We had to surface a lot of information laid out so it reads clearly, without ever feeling heavy. Two users, two opposite design problems: protect the child from overload and give the parent clarity at a glance.
Built for a glance
The dashboard answers "how's my kid doing?" before a parent scrolls. Headline stats up top, detail below. We leaned on visual encoding over tables: a bubble chart sizes a child's favourite subjects, a ring shows correct answers, bars compare performance. A parent reads the whole picture without having to parse numbers.
Multi-child, multi-grade.
A profile switcher moves a parent between kids, each with their own grade and data. One account can manage many children with no friction.
Approvals as triage
Pending requests surface on the dashboard, then open into a workflow a non-technical parent can run in seconds: approve a whole adventure, toggle individual quests, or read the actual AI answer before it reaches the child. Approve-all for trust and quest-level toggles for control.
The parent and the AI work hand in hand
A parent can lead the learning narrative themselves or follow the suggestions the AI crafts from their initial inputs. Designing that balance was the key decision: AI stays a support system, never taking over the story.
The long-term value of responsible UX for children
Protects early childhood development.
Builds lasting parental trust.
Eliminates digital sensory overload.
Encourages healthy screen boundaries.
Puts education over engagement.
Frequently asked questions
Designing for children requires balancing diverse cognitive development stages within a single system and eliminating addictive feedback loops. Unlike adult software that prioritizes speed, kids' app design must prioritize low sensory stimulation, generous target touch areas for developing motor skills, and layout structures that account for physical screen contact, such as resting palms on a stylus canvas.
E-ink UI design requires adapting to slow refresh rates and a limited color gamut. To design for e-ink effectively, you must eliminate all fluid animations and micro-interactions to prevent screen stutter. Additionally, brand color palettes must be manually retuned with higher saturation levels so that muted, desaturated screens render tones accurately without losing clear visual hierarchy.
Responsible UX design focuses on intrinsic rewards rather than compulsive engagement loops. It means intentionally removing attention hooks like streaks, badges, and push notifications that trigger sensory overload or emotional dysregulation. Success is measured by educational milestones achieved rather than total screen time or daily active usage.
Safe AI design for children requires strict parental guardrails and age-appropriate reframing. Raw chatbot interfaces should be contextualized as interactive learning companions or storybook characters. Behind the scenes, machine-generated outputs must pass through a companion parent dashboard for triage and approval before reaching the child's screen.
For children who cannot yet read fluently, interfaces must prioritize symbol-first and icon-driven navigation. Actions should be supported by highly recognizable visual cues, generous touch spacing for smaller hands, and consistent layouts that allow children to safely explore the digital environment without getting lost or stuck behind confusing navigation paths.