UX + UI / Research / Visual Design / Branding
A app designed for children to learn about emotions, and their parents or guardians, to easily understand their emotions and communicate more effectively with the child.
Jell-E-Motions is a app mainly for smart watches, Google Nest Hub, and Samsung Family Hub (refridgerator), but mobile is also an option. The app is maily for children between the ages of 3 and 12 years old who have issues expressing their emotions with their parents or guardians. They also have trouble understanding their own feelings. Children are easily able to use the platform to understand how they feel and submit it to their parents or guardians. Parents are able to receieve the notifications from their children with the options of responding via app, tips to help child with emotion, and dashboard of a child’s progress during a period of time.
Children and parents have issues understanding and expressing them to each other.
July 2021 to July 2021
Design a app that is responsive on different screen sizes that allows children and parents to communicate through the app about emotions .
Lead UX / UI Designer and Researcher
Conduct interviews, paper and digital wireframing, low and high- fidelity prototyping, conduct usability studies, accounting for accessibility, and interacting on designs.
I conducted a research for children and parents, asking a series of questions of their problems with expressing emotions to each other and where the communications show conflict. I asked what type of app would help their communication. This started the research process which later started the design process.
Apps are difficult to come by where child and parents can easily use the interface.
Users need a app that is engaging enough to the child so they are happy to use it all of the time
Users are not able to effectively speak to their child about the feelings.
Users need a app that can be used on home items such as refridgerator and nest hubs. Smart watches are also used to calculate hart rate of child to asses their mood. Not all children have phones.
“I want my Sophie to learn how to deal with her emotions in a fun way.”
Kim is a stay at home mom who loves teaching her children new things. She has a 7 year old daughter named Sophie,that has a hard time expressing her when she has temper tantrums. She needs a easy way to keep her 7 year old occupied and learn their emotions in a fun and productive way.
Occupation: Stay at Home Mom
Kim is a young stay at home mother and wife who needs a app to better communicate emotions with her daughter Sophie, because she wants to be able to better help her with her mood swings.
Kenzie is a 6 year ols 1st grader who has a problem with expressing her emotions. She acts out in temper tantrums and feels she is often misunderstood. She needs a app to communicate with her parents and teachers to express her emotions.
“I wish mommy knew how I felt when I was sad.”
Kenzie is a 6 year old 1st grader whos needs a app to better communicate to her parents how she feels, because she is often misunderstood.
Goal: Find a easy way for daughter to communicate emotions and find healthy ways to work through them.
Once paper wireframes were completed, I had an understanding of the layout of the app. However during creating the digital wireframes, I did change some layouts to better fit the user’s needs.
The questions are read out load and all clickable buttons.
Notification of child submiting emotional check.
These are automatic when sound is on, but can be clicked after if child needs to hear again.
This helps children understand the difference between bad and good mood by using a color scale.
Records children’s responses and produces text of it below.
This will go to the tips page and give parents insight on helping their children.
Easily create a profile to add to the dashboard.
This is a option to respond to child through app instead of face to face to improve communication.
Can see the children’s emotions and compare them through out the day.
Low - Fidelity Prototype
Once the digital wireframes were created, I created the low - fidelity prototype, in which connected the user flow.
A study was conducted using the low-fidelity prototype. The study revealed changes that were helpful to increase the user experience. This helped guide the designs from wireframes to mockups.
Majority of the younger children who couldn’t read missed the start button the first time viewing the app.
On the admin side, it was known the notification page was crowed and was confusing.
Some users did not understand the icons, so audio and lables were added.
This was the begining of the high-fidelity design with regards to the need changes that were found in the usability test.
Based on insight I made changes to improve the apps start button to be more child friendly. I made it animated with gifs that are the main theme of the app to intise the child to clip on it. This was more effective in grabing a young child’s attention.
Based on insight I made changes to improve the app’srecording feature on the child side of the app. I moved the button to the bottom left corner so that it is not distracting to the words being accumulated below. I also made the done button bigger and highlight automatically when the child stops talking so the child knows to press the button when finished.
Based on insight I made changes to improve the speaker button in the top right hand corner. I added the small audio button for a child to reconize the button from audio. I also added a lable to it that says when the sound is on and off.
Colors were chosen to be bright and shades or greens, blues and violets. Blues are considered to be calming for children who often struggle with temper tanrums. Purples are also know to slow the pace of a child.
Branding
Jell-E-Motions is the name of this app inspired from the cool gifs that resemble balls of jelly that help children better understand their emotions.
The Jell-E-Motions brand is based around the gifs that resemble jelly blobs that have distinked emotions children can better relate to and recongnize.
Mali bold was the main typography used in this app. Mali is considered to be child friendly and easy to read.
I created different screen size variations with Google Nest Hub being the main screen size. I also incorporated a Samsung Family Hub screen variation for their refridgerators, giving the whole family easy acces to it, I also incorporated a apple watch variation for easy notifications and recomendations based apon heart rate.
The final prototype presented a fun user flow for both child and parent platforms for expressing and learning emotions with ease, and improving child and parent communication.
Automatic audio for children who cannot read or are impaired.
For visually impaired individuals, alt text was added to images for screen readers.
Conduct more user research to determine any new areas of need.
Design a easy and accessible messaging system between parent and child.
This application made parent and child communication about emotions easier.
I learned when designing this website that a great idea is only good when it is user friendly. I put users ahead of all features that would make their user experince great.
Thank you for your time of reviewing my work on the Jell-E-Motions website! If you’d like to see more or get in touch, my contact information is provided below.