Parents, caregivers and teachers want to provide children with the knowledge of emotional regulation. Caregivers can not always be available during the times of crisis when it’s most important to intervene and provide a learning moment. While these skills are not always accessible in homes and schools they are vital for children to develop independence and resilience in their adult lives.

A voice activated companion for children that provides users with entertainment and emotional regulation skill building.

Going into research it was important to set some goals for discovery. Having a clear understanding of best practices for voice user interfaces and learning models for children helped to create guardrails for future design decisions.

Research began with understanding current learning models geared towards emotional regulation. After learning about a wide variety of approaches two main models were honed in on that would act as the foundation for Welbie.

Both of these learning models emphasize the importance of not judging emotions, learning mindfulness, and building skills that can lead to expressing big emotions in a more manageable way. Both the DBT and RULER models are filled with helpful tools and activities that can apply directly to a VUI flow. Empowering parents and children to make learning emotional regulation a more self-guided process.

With these models in mind, research continued with a survey of several parents. The goal is to uncover what skills they use to build emotional independence in their child, and what role a VUI might play in that.

The results showed a lot of emphasis on independence being important. However, it’s difficult for parents to balance growing independence while still supporting their child in times of emotional distress.

The research conducted so far led to a persona pair of mother and daughter that highlights two key perspectives when it comes to learning and teaching emotional regulation.

Based on the insights discovered during research, the JTBD framework helped to develop those findings into possible goals and reasons that a user might "hire" a specific product. The "jobs to be done" statements that we developed are based on our persona pair that highlights the two perspectives of parent and child.

With these reasons for hire in mind, we were able to start ideating some possible features for the VUI toy. We did this by creating must have, should have, could have, and won't have columns where we then conducted a post up and sorted potential features into their appropriate columns.

The system persona outlines the goal of our VUI and the overall tone and energy that it will offer our user depending on the context of the interaction.

To come to this persona we explored a range of adjectives that felt either in line or out of line with the needs of our user. Then we mapped our system's tone of voice in context-specific scenarios with a personality map.

We created our first happy path based on a scenario for our child persona Ella. The scenario for our happy path is that Ella is starting to feel overwhelmed and is looking for a way to calm down. This flow was a rudimentary exploration of what the interaction could look like in a best case scenario.

Testing our Voiceflow prototype was an important part of the design process. While we were only able to test Welbie's happy path on an adult we were still able to gain some valuable insights and validations.

This project was a great opportunity to learn about voice user interface design, designing a system persona, and developing a product around user needs. We had a challenging time getting the product tested with children which really was a limitation for creating a truly user oriented experience and something we would prioritize more if we were to do it again.