In the summer of 2015 we worked with mental health care organisation Ixta Noa on a project codenamed KOKORO, a mental health coach for teenagers and a life skills teaching tool for educators. The goal of the project was to help teenagers gain greater insight into and control over their thoughts and feeling. The idea was to provide teenagers with a digital tool that would allow them to help themselves deal with the everyday challenges of adolescence.
A coaching app and a teaching tool
We created a prototype of the coaching app and the teaching tool. The aim of the prototype was to enable Ixta Noa to (1) test wether the chosen approach would be engaging and effective and (2) convince potential partners to support the further development of the product.
The coach takes the form of a mobile chat app. Teenagers check in with a character called Noa and talk about what is bothering them. Noa offers support by helping them structure their thoughts and feelings and formulating courses of action. The conversational user interface is immediately recognisable and fun to use.
The teaching tool contains lesson programs which supports teachers in the training of life skills in a classroom setting. It also provides teachers with insights from the data collected by the digital coach. Such data is anonymised and none of it is collected without prior consent from teenagers.
The coaching app also ‘knows’ which parts of the training teenagers have completed in the classroom and connects these to the issues a teenager reports to be struggling with. In this way life skills are contextualised by each teenager’s unique situation.
Workshopping, prototyping and playtesting
To kick off the project we ran a design workshop with the client in which we used our engagement loop model to collaboratively sketch out possible approaches to the problem. The workshop outcomes were synthesised in a design document.
We also interviewed teenagers individually about how they deal with life challenges and what things they already use to do so. This provided us with wonderful sources of inspiration some of which found their way into the product quite directly. Most notably, we included the idea of outputting aspirational images at the end of sessions for them to save and share. This acted as both a fun reward and also as an authentic word-of-mouth marketing mechanism.
After the workshop and the interviews we proceeded to design and develop a prototype over the course of two sprints, each lasting roughly three weeks. Halfway through we ran a playtest and we finished the project with a demo.
We tested the prototype with a group of teenagers from different schools and backgrounds. We brought them together in one room and invited them to all bring their own device (most of them affordable Android smartphones). We began with an open-ended conversation about the subject which surfaced the broad range of individual experiences. After the discussion we invited them to use the prototype as we walked around and quietly observed and made notes on their behaviour. We finished the session by collecting feedback from each teenager individually, organising it and discussing it. The playtest outcomes provided us with the raw materials for the second sprint’s backlog.
Technology and next steps
The prototype runs in any browser, is designed mobile first and requires no server side logic. The conversations were written in Gingko because of its unique branching model. We developed our own JSON format and Javascript engine for conversations. The frontend was rapidly developed using the ZURB Foundation framework and CodeKit.
The project provided Ixta Noa with a clear way forward for the product’s development. An independent team has been spun off from the organisation which is now planning the product’s further development. Our work has enabled them to test assumptions early and in a brief timeframe. They have also gained deep understanding of the resources they will require in order to move forward. We look forward to seeing the results.
Engaging sleep mode
First of all, best wishes for the new year.
Before looking ahead, a quick look back. 2015 was great for us. In our end-of-year review of 2014 we said we wanted to balance creative success with more commercial success. And we did. Business was good in 2015. We did much more consulting compared to the year before and we worked on one big production project throughout the year. We also continued to find time to continue work on our own projects.
Not a bad place to start the new year, right? But after six years of running Hubbub we feel our configuration as a boutique playful design agency and perhaps more importantly the frames of ‘serious games’ and ‘gamification’ have outlived their usefulness. Paradoxically ‘games’ itself feels averse to our main interest: the role of play in the design of humane technology.
After some soul-searching we have decided to significantly scale back our day-to-day investment in the organisation. Effectively this means Hubbub is going into hibernation for the foreseeable future. We won’t take on new engagements in 2016. It goes without saying we will be honouring our prior commitments to clients and we will continue to promote and sell our own products Bycatch and Cuppings.
But the principals, that is to say me and Alper are free to pursue other paths. Alper has joined ResearchGate in Berlin as a software engineer. Kars is spending half a year in Singapore and has returned to freelance consulting.
We look back with great fondness on these past six years and are proud of all the work we have done. We are grateful to all the people who put their trust in us as clients and to all the people who chose to collaborate with us. The core of Hubbub may have remained tiny throughout the years but the circle of talented individuals who became part of our network has continuously grown and remains its greatest asset. A big thank you to everyone involved.
And finally our thanks to you dear reader for joining us on our journey for however long it has been. Here’s to new beginnings in 2016.