THROUGH A CHILD'S EYES

We started broad to learn about the biggest problems in childcare and childhood, and then used iterative research to narrow down our solution from there.

Through multiple studies, we learned that teaching young children mindfulness was both crucial and difficult. Separately, we were inspired by observing the tactics of experienced parents and teachers, who often had games and tricks up their sleeve to make lessons stick.

Could games be the pathway to teaching children mindfulness?

Gamification seemed like a cool idea, so I designed a prototype to dig deeper. I recruited a parent and asked her to design a game to teach her child, to see how the process would work.

The observations were unexpected. Our participant got extremely flummoxed at the gamification task. Then, unprompted, her daughter grabbed the pen from her mom's hand and started drawing out an idea of her own.

I saw this pattern repeat in secondary research findings. I started to call this the "generational creativity gap:" Parents recognized games' effectiveness but felt paralyzed creating them. Children exist in an enhanced creative state that parents can't easily reach.

Due to the immersive nature of a VR application, we found it to be the best modality to bring mindfulness to children, especially given the proven benefits of VR meditation apps over other screen-based apps¹.

We acknowledged the constraints: lack of accessibility, affordability limiting scalability. But we predicted that hardware will soon advance to affordable VR headsets in every home, and decided to prototype an experience that makes a positive impact in that future.

We chose an anthropomorphic panda as our main avatar based on research on virtual animals in immersive experiences². Studies have shown that furry, animal-like avatars in immersive experiences improve feelings of connection and presence. The soft, friendly appearance of our panda guide helps create a safe, non-threatening environment for mindfulness practice.

We opted to use color to serve aesthetic as well as signalling purposes. Purple indicates interactive controls the child can tap, while pink draws attention to guidance and feedback. This distinction reduces cognitive load, as kids learn to recognize what's tappable without reading labels.

We applied a heuristic evaluation to our med-fi prototype before coding it in Unity, as a low-cost way to add refinements such as robust error handling and ensure consistency. Heuristic evaluation is a process by which a design team can evaluate their own designs through comparing it against a list of design heuristics prepared by Jakob Nielsen³. We tag-teamed this process — while our co-design lead made the initial Figma mockup, I was in charge of applying design changes in accordance with the Nielsen heuristics.

I designed the narration of the meditation experience to create an immersive storytelling experience as well as designing a voice on ElevenLabs to bring our anthropomorphic Panda to life. We handed off designs to our developer who built out the experience on Unity using the ShapesXR plugin to leverage our Figma designs.

During the development phase, I was the designer on-call to make last minute design changes to ensure engineering feasibility such as editing the script to make it a shorter length, editing out any gestures or emotions that would not be feasible to implement given our timeline, and more.