Moodie

Inspiration

Working with young children can sometimes be distressing for parents, especially as children struggle to communicate what they feel. When negative feelings get in the way of a parent's relationship with their child, children may not learn how to gain awareness over their emotions, properly process what they feel and learn how to handle strong emotions. Parents who struggle with this may benefit from a way of measuring how their child understands their emotional sense of self. This could help guide how to approach conversations regarding emotional wellness.

What it does

Moodie is a digital toy tablet with a customizable character that talks to the child, directing them to tell more about what they are feeling. When the Moodie is turned on, the character greets the child, and asks them how they are doing. The tablet then asks the child to select between six emotions, each accompanied by pictures showing what the emotion looks like for easier identification for the child. The child is then given options to write, speak, or draw any feelings they might have through various prompts. The parents can access a 'results' page through the Moodie, from which they can see all of the entries the child has made. When an entry is selected, the parent can see the emotion the child chose, and any words or drawings that were submitted in response to the prompts. This is followed by tips that can help parents initiate talks with their child, and how to respectfully maintain them.

How we built it

We built the interface using Figma Make. We started by telling the model our concept, and providing it images of our user flows and low fidelity wireframes made through Figma Design. We then refined the interface until it looked and acted the way we wanted it to.

Challenges we ran into

A lot of our thought ended up going into thinking about how to make the mode of input child-friendly. Moodie's target audiences is parents with children between the ages 3-6, and children between that range have a wide range of low-level reading and comprehension skills. We decided to include a variety of ways that the child could express their emotions on the Moodie to cater for the various ways they may be comfortable with.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our research, process, and thinking for the product. We put a lot of effort into thinking about how the product could be accessible for children to understand and use. Many of us had also never used Figma Make before, and we are proud that we ended up making something that works and reflects our product idea.

What we learned

Working on the prototype for Moodie challenged us to think about user experience across different age demographics, since the product has both a child and parent interface. This project highlighted the differences between designing for audiences with vastly different levels of comprehension and thinking.

What's next for Moodie

While we don't have anything planned to actually bring this idea to life, if we were to a good first step would be creating a full prototype on a toy tablet and testing it between both a child and parent. We are curious to see where the device would succeed and fail in receiving the inputs expected from the child, and what other information or measurements might be desired by the parents.

Built With

• figma