Mission Countdown: Solving Separation Anxiety in Young Children
By Anthony Milne with Jeanne Annpark
Abstract
Designed for the iPad Pro, Mission Countdown addresses the problem of loneliness between young children ages 5 to 8 and their traveling or deployed parents.
Mission Countdown is an interactive calendar game designed to help young children overcome separation anxiety and help traveling or deployed parents feel more strongly connected to the day-to-day affairs of their children. Through Mission Countdown, children can visualize the amount of time until their loved-ones return, engage and connect through collaborative gameplay, and strengthen their support network by playing Missions with multiple people.
The Problem
We began our need-finding by conducting interviews with individuals from a variety of ages and interest groups:
- Deployed military parents and their children
- Parents who frequently travel for work and their children
- College kids with younger siblings
An interesting quote inspired our design process:
“The root of loneliness is the lack of connection”
There are no existing solutions for young children to virtually foster connections, and this problem is especially prominent for children with parents who travel frequently or are deployed. User interviews revealed three key pain points.
Pain Point #1: Current methods of communication do not facilitate connections because children are not engaging in a shared experience.
Children do not form connections through conversation, but through shared experiences of play. Phone and video calls are insufficient in fostering connection, and fail to address the short attention span of children.
Young children do not know how to articulate their feelings to their parents, and they often only provide short, one-word answers to questions about their day and how they’re feeling. One adult stated,
“they’ll show off their new toy for a minute over Skype, and then get distracted and leave to go play with it.”
Many college students are able to connect with their younger siblings from home through video games. One college student told us that he enjoys playing online video games with his younger brother because their shared activity promotes conversation to feel natural.
Games are a shared experience that engages the younger sibling and facilitates connection through natural communication.
Finally, between school, extracurriculars, and early bedtimes, younger children have limited free time in their day, and it does not usually align with the time of the parent’s availability. We also talked to a child of a deployed military parent, and they emphasized that the difference in time zones constrained their corresponding free time with their parents.
Pain Point #2: Young children are unable to visualize time and cannot conceptualize the return of their parents.
Young children have trouble conceptualizing long periods of time, and this leads to heightened feelings of separation anxiety. For example, one child repeatedly asked how many “sleeps” before their father returns home. Children are visual learners, and they need a method to visualize the amount of time before they reunite with their loved one and understand that they are coming home.
Pain Point #3: While traveling or deployed, parents feel disconnected from their children’s day-to-day lives.
The age range of 5–8 is a very formative time in a child’s life; they are learning and encountering new experiences every day. When parents extensively travel during this time period, they miss out on pivotal events and lessons that the child is learning. Further, when parents are absent from the child’s extracurriculars and socialization with friends, they are less connected to the child’s life outside of the family. As a result, parents struggle to surpass a surface-level relationship with their child, which inhibits the ability to form deep bonds with each other.
Ultimately, parents need a more effective method to engage with their children and better understand their day-to-day affairs.
The Process
User Journey Maps
The user journey maps highlight the events that occur during the parent-traveling process and differentiate the parent’s and child’s journey. We highlighted the opportunities with the most potential to improve upon:
- Children feel a lack of support during the parent’s absence.
- Parents want to be connected and present in their child’s activities.
- Communication is limited by time and location constraints.
This further lead us to brainstorm How Might We statements:
- How might we help young children with traveling parents overcome their separation anxiety?
- How might we help traveling parents feel more connected in the day-to-day activities of their young children?
- How might we promote stronger connection between traveling parents and young children regardless of location and time zone constraints?
Young children need a playful way to engage with faraway family while visualizing their time apart in order to feel connected and supported.
Sketching
I designed initial sketches inspired from user research and insights, which focus on games that connect the parent and child, and a visual calendar that allows the child to see the amount of time before their parent returns.
Low-Fidelity Wireframing
From our refined sketches, we translated our favorite sketches to low-fidelity greyscales. I focused on designing variations of the virtual calendar and games that promote conversation between parent and child.
Our user research also showed that a child’s separation anxiety decreases if they have a stronger support network. I designed a feature that allow children to play with multiple people, to reinforce their network.
I conducted user testing and recieved interesting insights:
- User’s appreciated a consistent theme throughout the app because children will perceive the communication as a game.
- User’s connected with the space theme because it represents the physical distance between the parent and child.
- Parents wanted the communication games to provide leading questions to help initiate conversation.
Style Guide
Before moving onto high-fidelity wireframing, we designed a Style Guide as a template for our space-themed prototype. We utilized dark purple and blue to emphasize the space background and vibrant colors to make the graphics and icons more playful.
Our Call to Action buttons are white with a black background in order to emphasize them on the screens and cards. Finally, our cards incorporate two methods of closing: an “x” in the top right corner, and a “close” Call to Action button. We found that young children who struggle with reading selected the “x,” and the children who can read preferred the “close” button to display their reading skills.
The Solution
Defining Priorities
In order to address the pain points found in our user research, we decided to integrate and prioritize the following features into our app:
Interactive Games:
I focused on designing each game and the overall gaming experience for the parent and child. The games keep the child engaged in the social interaction, and help the conversation feel natural. This method proved to have previous successes from our interviews with college students playing video games with their younger siblings. Each day unlocks a new mission, which promotes daily interaction between the parent and child, and the gamified experience allows conversation to feel genuine.
Our first Mission is a video form of Tic-Tac-Toe. The child and parent play the game; however, each time they inhabit a spot, they record and send a video.
The opponent can then view the video on the grid, and play another spot by sending a response video. This method promotes verbal conversation, and it allows the parent to physically ask the question, but also provides the child with extended time to craft a more thoughtful response.
The Mission ends when the child or parent gets “three-in-a-row,” and they are given the option to play multiple times throughout the day.
A second Mission is Draw Together. A prompt is provided, and the parent and child both draw on the screen simultaneously, or individually if there are time constraints.
This Mission’s Draw Together prompt is “Draw Your Day,” which promotes conversation about the day-to-day activities of the child. In our interviews, we found that children enjoy drawing with their parents, and they enjoy building off of each other’s design.
Our current prototype presents these two Missions; however, after interviewing our child users, we received inspiration to innovate further games. Ultimately, these games do not involve complicated strategy, rather they are meant as an engaging activity that promotes a shared experience and deeper conversation between the parent and child.
A Visual Calendar:
Through a visual countdown calendar, children can better understand the amount of time before they are reunited with their loved ones. We saw that children consistently ask how many days until they see their parents, and they often have trouble conceptualizing time.
The visual calendar acts as the homescreen for each storyline countdown. Each planet represents one day closer the parent-child reunion, and every day, the spaceship moves to the next planet, thus representing a countdown before the spaceship reaches the parent. Each planet contains a new Game Mission, and because the child’s avatar is moving through planets in the spaceship, they feel like they have influence over the parents return.
We wanted children to intuitively understand that their character is working their way closer, and thus, counting down to the reunion with their parent. In order to make this feature intuitive, the spaceship begins on Day 16 (or the allotted duration of the Mission). Additionally, the spaceship shines a light on the current day’s planet, and that specific planet is enlarged. After each day, the spaceship moves onto the next consecutive planet.
Finally, we realize that these conversations will be meaningful for the parent and child, so both players can access the game results from previous planets and Missions. As a result, the parent can track their child’s progress, and the child can be further reminded of their connection with their loved-one.
Multiple Narratives:
The Select Mission screen allows the player to select additional journeys with different players. As a result, the parent can play with more than one child. For the children, the ability to play with multiple absent loved-ones reminds them of their larger support network, which further reduces their separation anxiety. Finally, they can strengthen their communication skills by interacting with more people.
I designed the Select Mission screen to be scrolled horizontally, which is consistent with the horizontal scrolling of the Mission Calendar. Each rocket takes them to that specific player’s Mission Calendar. Additionally, on this page, the player can create new missions by entering their desired player’s AstroID and length of mission.
Usability Testing
With our high resolution prototypes, we conducted usability testing with children, ages 5 and 8. We also talked to their parents, around the age of 40, and 20 year old college students with younger siblings.
We received helpful feedback and implemented changes to our prototype:
- Reduced the distance between planets in the visual calendar to increase visibility of past dates and planets. This allows the horizotal scrolling feature to be more intuitive for the user.
- Changing the user flow of the Tic-Tac-Toe game to directly prompt the user to watch their parent’s video before playing their next turn. Initially, users did not read instructional text, and they attempted to play their turn instead of watching the parent’s video.
- Changing the color of the Call to Action buttons from red to light blue. Users believed that all red buttons indicate an error state.
Conclusion & Next Steps
Mission Countdown was created for parents who want to feel more connected to their young children, and it provides children a method to express their emotions in a fun and engaging environment.
User interviews from children provided insights on additional games to implement into Mission Countdown. I will continue to create and prototype new games to diversify methods of increasing communication between parents and children. Some game ideas I hope to implement in the future include Drawing (with ability to add onto each other’s pictures), Card Matching, and Hangman.
Jeanne and I received very positive feedback from our users, and many parents expressed that they wished they had been able to use this app when their children were younger. We are excited to continue iterating and progressing our prototypes, as well as mangaging our new team, as Mission Countdown moves into development stages.
