top of page
.jpg)
Expert Interview
.png)
In order to find out how to effectively resolve the challenges parents face, we contacted child development experts from Weill Cornell and researchers in developmental psychology. They suggested methods that worked in the past and things to be aware of.
Key Insights
-
Behavior reinforcement is an effective method to motivate children
-
Gamification methods worked well in the past
-
Parents should be parts of the game process
-
Be careful with rewards
Parent Interview
In order to find out how to effectively resolve the challenges parents face, we contacted child development experts from Weill Cornell and researchers in developmental psychology. They suggested methods that worked in the past and things to be aware of.
Key Insights
-
Different children are motivated and challenged by different things
-
Rewards could come in different forms and ways
-
Sometimes with external rewards can be good for children
-
Kids enjoy playing with their friends when they can't meet them in person, seeing them virtually make kids feel engaged
.png)
.png)
.png)
Market Research
We conducted market research, in order to find out what is being offered on the market that would help solve the problems. We noticed that there are many products that allow people to track goals that are quite generic, and the products that are designed for kids are not engaging enough.
Design Research
In order to come up with effective gamification methods to motivate children, I read the Actionable Gamification book by Yu-Kai Chou. In his book, he introduced the Octalysis Framework is a human-centric gamification design framework that lays out the eight core drives for humans motivation.
Key Insights
-
When people are lack of intrinsic motivation, they need extrinsic rewards to keep them motivated
-
For mundane tasks, people perform better with extrinsic rewards
-
Balance intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to create engaging experiences.
Ideation
Knowing that the star chart method worked well in the past, we know that we wanted to expand on this idea and come up with a modern version that addresses the needs of our users. We began asking ourselves design questions and tried to ideate possible solutions.
Design Goals
-
Gamify everyday tasks, make things children do in real life more fun
-
Find a form that is engaging for children and allow them to define their own rewards
-
Allow parents to be part of the gamification process and enable them to help children achieve things
Design
Form
After setting some design goals we want to achieve, we begin to think of the possible forms of our product, and went through the pros and cons of each form.
After evaluating the effectiveness of each form, our specialties, and the difficulty of executing each option. We decided to go with the application option. For the application, we want to create an engaging experience that gamifies everyday activities.
The app consists of two parts, the parent's part, and the kid's part. We imagine that parents and kids can both use the Star Quest but for different features.
Application
For Parents
Parents can invite family members, add goals, rewards and quests for their children, approve goals and rewards added by their children, and check the goal completion status for each child.
For Kids
Kids can create avatars, add goals, rewards, and quests, complete goals, rewards, and quests, see the status of their friends and use the stars they gained to redeem rewards.
1. Define your own goals and rewards
Knowing that different children might have different goals and are motivated by different rewards, we hope to allow children to create their own goals and rewards.
In order to make the goals and rewards feature easy to use, we hear from users that they would prefer suggestions of what goals and rewards to add, so I changed the add goals and rewards pages from pages with simple input fields to offering more options for people to choose from.
Main Features
2. Complete goals and redeem rewards
Once the goals and rewards are added, children can complete their goals to earn stars and use the stars they earned to redeem the rewards they want.
3. Allow children to create their avatar
Based on our research, creating an avatar is an effective way to give children a sense of ownership, especially when they are lack of motivation, they need extrinsic motivation to stay motivated.
4. Allow children to create their quest
From talking to users, we realized that finishing tasks are mostly short-term goals, parents are also looking for ways to motivate their children to complete long-term goals. Therefore I came up with the quest feature to encourage children to complete long-term goals.
We came up with some additional features based discoveries from our conversations with the users, in order to better accommodate their needs.
Other Features
5. Community
Knowing that many children miss playing with their friends, I came up with a community feature that allows them to add their friends and compete with them.
6. Request
After testing with the users, I added the request feature that allows parents to approve goals and rewards added by their children, they can approve or make changes to the goals and the rewards.
Visual System
With our product targeting children, we wanted to create a kid-friendly and approachable application that kids would love and parents could trust. We are inspired by space travel and collecting stars, thus we decided to name our product Star Quest, and create a visual system around mystic purple tone and playful illustrations.
bottom of page