emoote
An app for understanding emotions
Case Study
Role
UX Designer
Responsibilities
User Research
Art Direction
UX Design
Understanding emotions together
emoote is an online tool for teaching and understanding emotions. Focusing on children between the ages of 2-9 as well their parents, emoote's goal is to promote emotional education. emoote teaches users about emotions and helps them understand others and express their own feelings in a safe and healthy way, builidng good habits for both positive mental and emotional health.
The Problem
Everyone emotes in different ways. The first step to understanding these complex feelings is educating children about their emotions and how to express them in a positive and healthy way.
The Goal
Design an app for children and parents to use as a learning tool for promoting understanding emotions and feelings as well as how people express them.
Research Focus
Centered on parents and children, we created a study that examined how children learn and discuss emotions. Through research I found many parents like using digital-media resources for teaching and learning but are concerned about giving their child's access to the internet. They would be more willing to use digital tools if it was in the form of a dedicated app for children.
Building Personas
Jackson is a working parent who needs easily accessible resources to help him teach his children about emotions because finding those resources can be difficult and time consuming.
Ashley is a new teacher who needs help teaching her students about emotions because everyone learns differently. She wants resources that have visual, audio and tactile aids can give her students the most success.
Challenges
Many parents feel overwhelmed and stretch thin when it comes to finding educational resources. Those participating in the study wanted a tool that safetly allowed their children to explore their emotions. Many parents felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available and wasnted an easy, reliable and engaging resource for their children to learn from
Opportunities
Designing this app is about creating a user-friendly experience for children and parents to learn together. Using the tools from this app children would not only learn about emotions but also discuss and learn with parents healthly habits for builiding positive emotional relationships and mental health.
The Process
Using a variety of ideation exercises, I developed some basic designs for the app. I wanted to create a simple intuitive design that was usable for both parents and children and independantly by children. The main focus at this stage was to create an open interface that used simple buttons and pictures to direct the user experience.
Sketches
Wireframes
The focus during the wireframe and prototyping stages was to develop user-flow for the main focus of the app, a self-guided emotions journal. User's would be prompted on their feelings using pictures and words. This process would help users understand the emotion they were experiencing and then provide additional resources pertaining to that particular emotion.
View the low-fidelity prototype here
Usability Study Findings
User-safety
From the study we learned users (parents) found the user-flow intuitive and easy to navigate but wanted more control over what their child sees
More is better
Users indicated they liked the "quiz" function of the app but wanted to see more types of emotions added and the option to click more than one emotion.
Child in mind
Users (children) were all able to complete the basic functions of the 'emotion quiz' but felt the colours were too boring.
Refining the Design
Before Usability Study
After Usability Study
I was able to develop mock-ups based on the feedback from the usability study. This allowed me to clarify the designs and improved functionality.
Taking into account the feedback I recieved helped improve the self-guided functions of the app and brought up an important concern about added safety features.
Wanting to make the app appealing to children, I used colours, pictures and text to develop a variety of interactive buttons that would help guide users through their journey in a way that was fun and accessible.
Above: A portion of the userflow for the 'emotional journal' aspect of the app.
High Fidelity Prototype
Adding colour and shapes helped focus the user experience and built upon the feedback from the usability study.
View the high-fidelity prototype here
Building with responsive design in mind
When building this tool it was important to keep responsive design in mind. In order to make this app more accessible I wanted to be sure it would be usable on mobile, desktop and tablet devices. It was important that we kept a level of uniformity in colour and design to create a seamless transition from the mobile app with to the responsive versions.
Impact with purpose
Users found that this tool helped them have more candid conversations with their children about their emotions. They felt their children were able to safely learn online in a quick engageable and open ended way that helped them better understand their own feelings.
Takeaways
I learned that while projects like these are great initiatives that often encapsulate larger issues that can’t be solved all in one app. It is important to look at the data to understand and focus on the problem at hand and then build from there.
Creating an app for social good is a great chance to ruminate and understand the complexity of social issues' relation to technology and how these issues can inform your design process.