How I'm Feeling

Case Study • Tablet • Children's Game

Parents and children play together as they learn new emotions through an interactive storybook game.

About

How I'm Feeling is an interactive storybook app that teaches children about different emotions and how to recognize them in their own life. Through the use of quirky characters and short storylines, children can learn about emotions in a fun and engaging way.

Role

UX Designer, User Researcher, Visual Designer

Date + Duration

Fall 2018 // 10 weeks

Tools

Adobe Illustrator, Figma, Marvel

Overview

Designing for children is a much different experience than designing any other type of consumer product. There's a variety of ethics, cognitive development periods, and the need to appropriately match children's abilities to consider while designing. There's a fine line between designing a simple game for kids versus creating something harmful and addictive that can negatively impact their development.

Our project sponsor, Dr. Eunjung Kim from UW Medical, wanted us to create a supplementary tool for her parenting program for Korean families with children aged 0 - 5. She specifically wanted us to focus on cognitive development, as this is a critical skill developed at this age range.

A large part of the process required understanding what children thought and how they liked to play. It was important to interact with kids if we wanted to properly design for them. We worked with children throughout the design process. In the early stages, we studied how they played and employed co-design sessions to generate our initial ideas.

Further in the process, we ran play-usability sessions with families to get feedback to iterate our designs. Compared to adults, it's difficult to gauge a child's honest impressions through questioning so our team had to synthesize our findings through observation, cross-referencing with child psychology studies, and parent comments and feedback.

How I’m Feeling is an interactive storybook app that allows children to explore emotions through short character-driven stories. Children can explore open-world environments that feature various interactive elements. It asks them to identify the emotions characters feel in different scenarios. Each story encourages conversation between parents and children about their own experiences with these feelings. Instead of a solo experience for the child, it's intended to be played with together where child and parent can spend quality time together.

Explore the clickable prototype below.