Mouti
Using product design to reduce & prevent bullying behaviour
Mouti is an interactive product experience designed for children between 9 and 11 y/o to make them conscious of bullying behaviour and its consequences, focusing on students of public schools located in Bogotà, Colombia.
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The core of this project is using emotional recognition to enable children to manage their emotions and develop empathic consciences and relationships with their peers.
USER RESEARCH | PRODUCT DESIGN | GAMING | USER TEST
Role
I was the sole designer in this project during the last semester of my Bachelor's, the methods used in the project included user research, data collection, data testing, interviews, multidisciplinary research as well as focus groups, prototyping, and user testing.
Methodology
Design process
Before telling you more, this is the UX process that I defined before starting with the project. Thus to clarify the steps that I will follow and the methods I will implement, which ensure to make the best use of it.
The challenge
The emotions could be the key
Now let us analyze the challenge! This project is based on how emotional recognition has a huge impact on children's social behaviour, helps them understand themselves and others, communicate, and handle feelings and social interactions.
Why that age? I’m sure this is one of your questions right now, so the answer is that according to the research and professional interviews, between 9 and 11 years old children develop the ability to be aware of the feelings of others and imagine what it might be like to be in their position: Empathy! So that means is the moment to act :)
Now we know when and why but how to do it? The multi-disciplinary approach was the key! Talking with different actors and professionals like educators, parents, and psychologists, allows me to understand from different points of view the whole image of the situation and find two important insights that became the fundamental stones of this project: on one hand the impact and influence of the whole group of classmates or friends in a bullying situation and on the other hand, the project should go beyond a purely emotional recognition to have a real impact after the child is enabled of recognizing that his actions provoke a bad emotion on the peers, he/she should make a restorative action like apologies, explain himself or ask for forgiveness.
How to face it
From individual to group behavior
After attaining the insights from the interviews, documentation and state of art of current initiatives, I created two types of main actors based on the characteristics of the overall users, to help me understand what his/her goals and needs are and their pain points and how they change between individual and group behaviour.
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Now the fun part begins. I started with brainstorming and a lot of sketches without so many constraints to generate a cloud of ideas to face the project, from individual objects like anti-stress toys, and “emotions detectors”, to games, strategies and events that involve the whole group. All these first ideas were mapped, validated and discussed inside multidisciplinary focus groups. This gives me a clear path to follow and here is where Muoti came alive!
Let's recap what Muoti should be and not be before seeing the results:
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A physical and interactive product positioning in the classroom allows all students to interact as a group and make the whole experience more engaging.
02.
Children need to be aware that the emotions and expressions of Mouti are real and associated them with their own behaviour
03.
Will be desirable to have a peer-to-peer type of interaction between actors and Mouti. Maybe real size product?
04.
Drawing on the type of physical interaction between Mouti and the children is so important that the shape can’t be associated with a specific person, an animal or a gender.
05.
Mouti have to show their feelings when something happens, good and bad, using a different kinds of input and output, like colours, sounds, vibration and visual assets
Result
Time to droll on!
Now we know what Mouti should do but what it will be like? Let the funniest part start!
Shapes & colors time
I conducted interviews and in-place tests to know the colours, expressions, shapes and actions that children associated with each emotion (happy, sad, scared, angry), I also tested different characters' shapes and if they could be associated with specific animals or gender, I used the 90 percentile children height to determinate the size of Mouti, and play with different materials.
Interaction
At the same time that the look & feel were designed and tested, I also defined the interaction map, as I show in the image, Mouti starts in a neutral state and then there are 2 main states: scared and angry, there are a consequence of physical actions and the only way to exit of this states is to “ask for forgiveness” that in this case is to hug Mouti :)
At this point Mouti was real! and ready to be tested in a classroom. To be honest, I was exiting and scared at the same time, even though I tested all the design decisions, with children you never know!
The goal of this final user test was to know if they would be able to recognize the cause and effect of Mouti’s reactions and associate them with their own emotions and their peers. For the test, was important to observe the children interacting in their natural environment without moderating too much, so I just made a small overview of the project and stayed in the room without taking action to avoid influencing their behaviour, let them interact with the prototype and at the end ask some questions to the whole group.
Now is the moment to know if Mouti works or not! And the answer is, drum roll please, yes!!!
The children were exiting to interact with Mouti and when one child was directly “playing” the whole group was suggesting actions and laughing and screaming phrases like: “Oh my god is angry!”, “nooo, don't hurt it!”, “hug it, hug it”, “it’s feeling scared because you are too near! Give it space!” see the whole group interacting and taking part in the activity was so important because, in a real bullying situation, they have the power to stop it if they feel involved, despite the exiting of having a new game to play with there was a detail that made me say, it works! when some children hit Mouti or make him scared and then just want to go away leaving it in that state, the whole group don’t allow it, telling him that he needs to hug it, he needs to ask for forgiveness because he can’t just turn around without doing something after hurt someone! That was a revelling moment, I think this was the most exciting user test of my life!
Final comments
I hope that this case study made you feel all the fun, excitement and also fear that I feel with this project and gave you an idea of why I love designing and that I really care and believe in what I do, of course, I focus on showing the core of this project and the most interesting parts.
But I should point out, that this project also includes the phases of the feasibility study, the strategy to implement Mouti inside the schools, how to afford it by the city, strategies to maintain the interest to interact with it, and so on. Thanks so much for arriving here!