The Kids’ Guide to Cancer App is a world-first comprehensive guide to cancer for children. As lead UED I was privileged to begin by meeting with user cohorts including health workers, child-life therapists and most importantly families on a cancer journey. A pivotal moment in the Empathise phase was to define 8-13 year old children as the primary user, which enabled a focused solution. 

 

As the lower proportion of this cohort are still learning to read, we felt that characters should be central to the app's look and feel, along with a friendly balloon-motif navigation metaphor and big bouncy font. Only six main sections keep the content navigable for kids and prevent them from feeling overwhelmed. I handled the UED, touch-screen gesturing approach, Animation Storyboards & Scripts, Specification Writing and Copy in close collaboration with the Producer and Camp Quality's amazing team of advisers.

 

​Simple animations explain complex and confronting medical concepts. Our philosophy - shared by the client - was that children will be empowered by knowledge. The app has to be truthful but also gentle and easy to understand.
 

A brilliant Venezuelan-born street artist called M-lon was commisioned to create a suite of unique and lovable characters for this app. Focus Group testing early in the production process confirmed that kids loved them.