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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.

Results in a Nutshell

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Total more than 125K downloads 

Parents and teacher's reviews

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Role

Company

  • UI/UX Design

  • Sole Visual Designer

  • Sole Game Artist

  • The Little Soul

Team

  • Product Owner

  • Game Designer

  • Programmers

  • Animators

  • Marketing Team

Details in this Case study

  • Competitor Analysis, User Research, Define Persona, ideating, Design Workshop, Sketching, Mockups, Prototype, Usability Test, UI & Visual Design.

Product Positioning 

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. 

Product Design
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Target Market

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

  • Dilemma to have self-compassion

  • She doesn’t know how to deal with her Complicated emotions

  • 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.  

  • Ability to express his feelings and seek help when

       he needs it.

 EMOTIONS

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  • Guilty, confused, overwhelmed, ashamed. Scared 

  • I don’t know whom to talk to.

  • Maybe it was my fault

  • What if… ( what are they afraid of)

  • Not feelings safe, she Can’t trust

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  • Competitor’s products 

  • Gathering data through interviewing with professionals, psychologists, and potential users

  • Legal limitations related to underage children's information 

  • Learning what we can and can't do regarding our interaction with a potentially traumatized child

  • If we are going to be a partner with hotlines and schools, are there any guidelines that we need to follow?

  • What are these and how we can implement them?

Research 

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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. 

  • Children have an issue identifying their emotions,  it gets harder with traumatized children.

  • They tend to get disconnected from their emotions. 

  • In shelters, two of the common ways to help traumatized children to connect with their emotions are storytelling and playing.

Ideation

Facilitating a half day team workshop, we were able to find the best solution using a Miro board, where we could all participate in ideation and voting.

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Idea One

Using NLP to engage children with a character who shows their internal emotions, Like virtual pets 

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Pros:

  • A new method that brings the possibility of partnering with shelters that use the storytelling method

  • High possibility to keep our audience engaged because virtual pets ( a game genre with a similar engagement method ) have always been successful at attracting young people's attention.

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Cons:

  • A costly solution needs resources and research 

  • Not being able to measure the efficiency without costly, Time consuming MVP

Low Fidelity Prototype of  NLP idea, First Round

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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:

  • Fast and cheap MVP, Moderate cost compared to another product idea. 

  • A proven method that doctors have used.

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Cons:

  • Doctors use a child's body language while playing/story to find red flags; we can't do that through our application.  

  • It's not as engaging as an interactive and responsive character.

Prototype of  Storytelling idea

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Final Decision on Method

We had two main factors in making 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 (because 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 interactions) 

  • We wanted to see if the children would answer the character's questions or if they skip them

  • 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 straightforward illustrations in a prototype.

  • We wanted to see if the children were going to do the activities.

  • 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

  • low fidelity, 5 or 6 frames through “Invision”  with just the user case, to test the scenario.

  • Changes based on the feedback, testing on a larger group of 25 children.

  • 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 

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Rick Hanson,

Psychologist,  New York Times best-selling author. 

“The Little Soul has developed a wonderful app for kids that uses art therapy and games to help kids overcome the effects of childhood trauma.”

“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..”

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Visual Development

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 layout elements that help guide a user and make using the site faster, easier, and more enjoyable.

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Visual Elements

I asked our target age which designs they liked more, and here are the results.

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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.

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Sketch of Monster Cake

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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.

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Game Development

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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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Assets

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Main Takeaways

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Testing our focus group was significantly hard since we had a lot of legal issues with going to shelters and testing 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 bad feedback from the traumatized children's caregivers. Children who have gone through this traumatic experience go through that emotional trauma all over again by watching the main character's feelings. 

Fortunately, we had an outstanding director and experienced child psychologists on the team, which helped us to find a focus group with sexual abuse experience, and that 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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Thanks!

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