Meeka's Secret
Project Details
Designing an application for children 6-11 which addresses the complicated emotions that sexually abused children may experience. The goal is to educate and empower them so
they can open up and ask for help.
Role
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Product Design
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Sole Visual Designer
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Sole Game Artist
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Key Animator
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Overview
Meeka's Secret is an ebook developed in conjunction with child psychologists that addresses sexual abuse in a kid-appropriate way. A big gray worm touches Meeka, a little bug, on his wings, which -- according to the story -- is a bug's most intimate part of its body. Though at first, Meeka feels embarrassed and distressed, he eventually tells his parents and ends up feeling empowered. The book is professionally narrated and includes some minimal animation. There's also an endless runner game in which kids guide Meeka as he jumps to avoid obstacles and collect crystal balls.
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Product Positioning
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There are many organizations that provide services and hotlines for children who have gone through or/and currently are experiencing an ACE, and there are many apps that work on mindfulness. However, there is no platform that both teaches soft skills and which leads children to open up to a safe and professional adult or hotline service.
The big advantage of our product is the high quality and uniqueness of our app and the depth of experience and knowledge that has gone into creating a child-centered approach to a difficult topic.
The B2C market presents a challenge in that, parents often are not as open as schools are, to talking about the possibility that their child might have gone through adverse experiences.
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Target Market
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Target Market:
ALL CHILDREN 6-11 ( not just abused children, because 70% of abused children are hidden among other children )
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B2B: educators, publishers, and service companies with the same target market
Schools and school districts
Attending conferences such as the American Library Association or the APA
B2C: Parents and caregivers
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Problem
One out of ten children will experience sexual abuse.
Only 27% of them will tell someone in the first year of the event.
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Understanding Our Audience
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Mia, 8 years old, Student
Lives in LA, has access to phone and internet
Mia is one of the 63,000 children who became a victim of sexual abuse each year.*
She is 8 years old. She lives in LA and she has access to the internet and phone, but she is afraid to seek help or contact Hotlines. Only 38% of the young victims will seek help.
PAIN POINT
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Unable to speak up and defend herself
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Dilemma to have self-compassion
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She doesn’t know how to deal with her Complicated emotions
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She doesn’t know how to express herself.
GOALS
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Ability to define and understand her hard emotions and complicated thoughts after the trauma.
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Ability to express his feelings and seek help when
he needs it.
EMOTIONS
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Guilty, confused, overwhelmed, ashamed. Scared
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I don’t know whom to talk to.
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Maybe it was my fault
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What if… ( what are they afraid of)
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Not feelings safe, she Can’t trust
Product's Goal
Research
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Empower and gaining the trust of traumatized children to speak up and seek help.
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Competitor’s products
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Gathering data through interviewing with professionals, psychologists, and potential users
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Legal limitation related to underage children's information
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Learning what we can and can't do regarding our interaction with a potential traumatized child
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If we are going to be a partner with hotlines and schools, are there any guidelines that we need to follow?
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What are these and how we can implement them?
Challenges and concerns
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As I learned more about the project, I developed a list of questions that I wanted to make sure we addressed them before we create the prototypes.
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. What are the legal constraints in interacting underage children through the app?
.What are the emotional and mental constraints we should be aware of before start designing a product that targets traumatized children's emotions?
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Key Insights:
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We are now allowed to get any information from children under 13, even email addresses.
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Children have an issue to identify their emotions, it gets harder with traumatized children. They tend to get disconnected from their emotions.
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In shelters, two of the common ways to help traumatized children to connect with their emotions is storytelling and playing.
Understanding Our Partners
.If we want to release our product in schools, what are the education system requirements?
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I had a meeting with 3 teachers in different school districts in California. I found out that if we want to bring Meeka in US schools in phase 2, we need to be aware that all our educational content is aligned with the "social-emotional learning"l curriculum which clearly has defined by the US education system.
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Top three social-emotional skills based on California curriculum
We decided to not go further with the idea of partnering with schools for the page one and we postpone it for our second product due to the fact that their current focus for their grants was solely on social-emotional learning. We decided to fundraise from another known governmental organization: SFcaht. They focus was to find projects and products which help abused woman and children to get the help they needed. After negotiating with my manager, we decided to keep their factors in mind while developing the product.
Ideation
Idea One
Using NLP to engage children with a character who shows their internal emotions, Like virtual pets
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Pros:
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A new method that brings the possibility of partnering with shelters who use the storytelling method
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High possibility to keep our audience engaged due to the fact that virtual pets ( a game genre with a very similar engagement method ) always have been successful at attracting young people's attention.
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Cons:
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A costly solution needs resources and researches
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Not being able to measure the efficiency without costly, Time consuming MVP
Low Fidelity Prototype of NLP idea, First Round
Prototype of NLP idea, Second Round
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Idea Two
Using Storytelling to engage children with the game and educate them by simplifying what we want them to learn through a story. The main character will be a kid just like them who has the same conflict in her/his life.
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Pros:
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Fast and cheap MVP, Moderate cost compare to another idea for the production
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A proven method that have been used by doctors.
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Cons:
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Doctors use a child's body language while playing/story to find red flags, we can't do that through our application.
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It's not as engaging as a interactive and responsive character.
Prototype of Storytelling idea
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Final Decision on Method
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We had two main factors to make the final decision.​
One, How long our prototype keeps children engaged and two, how much it helps them to open up with writing or painting in response to the application ( due to the fact that psychologists mainly focus on body language and voice tone which we couldn't use for our application )
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NLP:
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We created a few conversations with the character ( less than 30 interaction )
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We wanted to see if the children will answer the character's questions or they skip them
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We use word hashing for their response to look for red flags
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Storytelling:
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We made a 30-page story with black and white and simple illustrations in a prototype.
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We wanted to see if children going to do the activities.
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If they relate to the character ( Wheather they go to the end of the game and story to see what happens to her/him )
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After reviewing our user's feedback with child psychologists and our director, we decided to focus on storytelling. However, we decided to add games to our application. We wanted to keep children engaged and also there was another important component to use the game: Children had to save Meeka, the main character to help him escape and run for help. We wanted to enforce their feeling of power and the feeling that they are able to help and save someone. Ultimately, we want them to feel that they are strong enough to help themselves.
Testing
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First round:
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Second round:
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Third round:
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5-8 children
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low fidelity, 5 or 6 frames through “Invision” with just the user case, to test the scenario.
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Changes based on the feedback, testing on a larger group of 25 children.
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MVP, Full Story, without animation and color, Measuring the efficiency.
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Results
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Content:
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Functionality:
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After the second test, I decreased the number of story pages and we added to the activities and game. The story was too long and children often lost their attention while listening to the story.
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After the third test, I deleted all the icons that were shown during the story, they were distracting the children.
I also enlarged home page icons and added more white space. Children had a problem
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Press and Reviews
“The HoOoOo Foundation has developed a wonderful app for kids that uses art therapy and games to help kids overcome the effects of childhood trauma.”
Rick Hanson,
Psychologist, New York Times best-selling author.
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“This lovely ebook nicely addresses the complexities of sexual abuse in a remarkably kid-friendly way” “The story's graphics are whimsical, the text is very accessible, even for younger kids. Meeka is relatable and his thoughts and actions are believable. The plot strikes a wonderful balance of describing abuse -and all the feelings that come after it..”
EDUCATIONAL VALUE: +A
Playful, Sense of being simple and childish
Art Direction
Undoubtfully, the visual elements in the application fulfill several functions instead of one. They should be not only decorative but there are important features of the user interface and cohesion with other elements of the layout help to guide a user and make using the site faster, easier and more enjoyable.
Undoubtfully, the visual elements in the application fulfill several functions instead of one. They should be not only decorative but there are important features of the user interface and cohesion with other elements of the layout help to guide a user and make using the site faster, easier and more enjoyable.
Usability
Children don’t have the same hand-eye coordination as adults, their input is less precise. Therefore, you will need much bigger buttons. Depending on the age-group, they might not even read yet, so you must create a UI that doesn’t rely on text.
Sketch
Animate
Sketch of Monster Cake
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Monster Cake Animate
Meeka's Character Design
Meeka's Animate
Sound Setting
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Illustrations
After the market research and creative search of the general style, I worked on the color choice that had to keep consistent for each mode. The color search resulted in an eye-pleasing palette harmonically combining warm and cold shades.
Meeka in forest, Calm and happy Mood:
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Different modes based on the story
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Gameplay
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.Interacting with objects in the scenery during story pages
.Jumping on enemies, across gaps, and over obstacles
.Using taps to explore the environment during gameplay
Assets
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Gameplay
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.Interacting with objects in the scenery during story pages
.Jumping on enemies, across gaps, and over obstacles
.Using taps to explore the environment during gameplay
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Main Takeaways
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Testing our focus group was significantly hard, due to the fact that we had a lot of legal issues to go to shelters and test sexually abused children. We decided to test the app on children in schools.
Everything looked great at testing but after launching the beta test, we got very bad feedback fro the traumatized children's caregivers. Children who have gone through this traumatic experience was going through that emotional trauma all over again by watching the main character's feelings.
Fortunately, we had a very good director and experienced child psychologists in the team which helped us to find a focus group with sexual abuse experience and that really helped us to create a better platform to help this child.
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My takeaway was to ask for help and work to find your specific focus group, no matter how hard it can be, including young children who were sexually abused. ​
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