Emotions Recognition Game
for children with
Autistic Spectrum Disorder
Objective
Children in the spectrum have more difficulty in different aspects of their life. The objective of this project was to redefine an inclusive and intuitive response to life-planning for autistic children
Solution
People in the autistic spectrum have issues with their social skills which can have a big impact on their lives. One of the most common issues related to social skills is the inability of people with ASD to understand the emotions of others. In order to help children practice recognizing people's emotions for long-term learning, we developed a mobile game concept that allows users to learn and match different emotions
Team
We worked on a team of 5 people. My role was to be the main UX/UI designer.
Responsibilities
Research, UX design, Prototyping, Coding the final prototype.
Process
Research
Learn more about people with ASD and the main issues in their lives.
Ideation
Based on our research find an area to focus on, look at similar apps and start ideating different options of how we can achieve what we want.
Design
Based on feedback, use the most promising idea to make wireframes of the game, and paper prototypes to test and iterate on the design again.
Prototyping
With the final wireframe create a digital prototype.
Research
This research was compromised by 2 parts: reading already published research on ASD and analyzing 3 cases of children with ASD. I was mainly involved in gathering academic research.
Our key findings were that although people with ASD have problems with their social skills, it doesn't mean that they don't want to have social interactions with others.
We decided to focus on improving Tim's cognitive social abilities through an educational approach.
We researched more about problems with cognitive social abilities in children with ASD. We found that children with ASD by the age of 7 have trouble recognizing emotions apart from "happy" and "sad". We also learned that children with ASD can learn to be more emotionally responsive. (Australian parenting site, Richdale A., 2017)
Ideation
Further research helped us to narrow down the area to focus on: Help Tim recognize emotions on people's faces with the help of an educational game.
We then chose different educational games and I looked at their interfaces.
What we learned from the other educational apps is that they use a lot of reinforcement of what was learned so it stays in the long-term memory rather than just in the short-term memory.
One thing we wanted to focus on was how we could display the progress of the user in the game, eg. current session vs the previous session, so it can be easily understood by the children, parents, and therapists.
Design
After reviewing the idea we had and getting feedback from the teaching staff, I made wireframe #1 and a paper prototype based on it. With the feedback gathered from wireframe #1, we iterated on the design and created wireframe #2.
Prototyping
The prototype was done by me and another team member using Game Maker Studio 2. The game screenshots were used to create a high fidelity wireframe. This is useful since we don't have the prototype anymore, but we can still show our idea visually.
What did I learn from this project?
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Research is a big and essential part of a project to be able to make a good product. Although this problem specifically required a lot of research, it allowed us to narrow down a very complex problem into something achievable.
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Putting my thought on paper in detail helps me to focus on what I am trying to achieve.
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Getting feedback early is very valuable especially if you can get feedback without having to spend a lot of time on it, such as using paper prototyping.