The UX of edutainment apps for under 8s
When you design the first app of its kind in Australia – and possibly the world – it’s a voyage of discovery.
We will share our learnings from the design and launch of “Okee in Medical Imaging” a revolutionary iOS and Android application built in collaboration with the Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) in Melbourne. RCH Educational Play therapist Siobhan Greene devised the initial idea two years ago after routinely finding many families were unprepared for what an MRI, CT or Nuclear Medicine scan involved. Research shows that children who are prepared for procedures cope significantly better.
Our brief was to bring this concept to life, designing a highly engaging solution to help children manage their expectations and anxiety pre, during and post their procedure.
By definition, rapid prototyping and production in a year-long highly Agile project with a user base of under-8s posed a number of challenges. While we tapped into best practice interaction design, empirical guidance was slim and some of our work was uncharted territory.
We’ll provide a candid insight into our initial assumptions, how these evolved as we delved into the project, and what we learned. We’ll talk about our iterative approach and what we discovered, both in terms of influencing the design of the app and also how to engage successfully with a young audience. We’ll also outline the testing environment, how we collaborated with the RCH in recruitment of our test groups and how we analysed the results.
The session will be of particular interest to attendees interested in:
- Interpreting and designing to a complex customer brief
- The interaction design and iterative testing of apps for under 8
- UX in a long-running agile project
