Blabber Case Study

A children's mindfulness iPad app prototype, built using Claude AI. Guided activities are recommended based on mood check-ins to teach emotional regulation. Includes the parent dashboard, read-along text-to-speech, interactive drawing and personalized content.

Project Brief • Solution • Challenges • Navigation by Feelings • Shake for Big Feelings • The Marshmallow Choice • Read-Along TTS • Parent Dashboard

PROJECT BRIEF:

Main Question: What if mindfulness was a required course early in education?

Investigating Key Terms:

1. MINDFULNESS: How do you teach a 4-year-old to regulate their emotions without relying on abstract concepts?

2. EARLY EDUCATION: What does the absence of play and recess look like in modern early childhood?

3. REQUIRED: If schools won't teach it, who does — and what tools do they need?

Research Questions:

1. Can we reduce reactivity in kids by scheduling times for them to create art, nap, read, and/or play?

2. What activities do children and parents enjoy the most?

3. What changes to your environment most efficiently and effectively change you?

4. How do we best capitalize on the time parents have after work to support their and their child's mental health?

Key Research Findings:

• Since 2001, the average weekly recess time in US schools has decreased by 60 minutes; over 75% of school districts have no formal policy requiring daily recess.

• Daily screen time for children 0–21 grew 60%+ from pre- to post-pandemic (2.67 → 4.38 hrs/day).

• 3 out of 4 high school students report at least one adverse childhood experience.

• 58% of 4-year-olds have their own tablet.

• Parents most often start their children on mindfulness apps to improve sleep, reduce stress, and reduce anxiety.

Problem Statement:

SOLUTION:

Blabber is a children's mindfulness iPad app built for ages 4–6. The core loop is parent-initiated, child-driven: a parent unlocks the app from a PIN-protected dashboard, the child checks in with their mood, and Blabber recommends a guided activity that meets them where they are emotionally. I worked with a team of five other designers.

The Path a Child Takes:

1. Parent unlock — PIN gate → Parent Dashboard → parent selects which child is using the app and sets a time limit.

2. Mood Check-In — The child taps one of three emoji faces: 😊 happy, 😐 okay, or 😢 upset.

3. Recommended Activity — Blabber serves an activity matched to the mood (drawing or dance or bubbles for happy, matching for okay, meditation or yoga for upset).

4. Marshmallow Choice — After the guided activity, the child is told they earned extra time and is asked: Play Now, or Save Extra Time for tomorrow?

5. Bedtime Sequence — A read-along sleep story, then a calming offline screen to close the session.

My Contributions:

• Navigation by Feelings (with James and Sami)

• Shake for Big Feelings modal

• The Marshmallow Choice (delayed gratification timer)

• Read-Along Text-to-Speech

• Continue Playing Timer (based on the Autism Time Timer)

• Parent Dashboard

• Break/Offline Screen

Impact:

Blabber became an iPad prototype with 25 named screens organized around a single linear flow: parent dashboard → child mood/activity loop → goodnight sequence.

CHALLENGES:

1. Designing for non-readers.

   • Children 4–6 are still building literacy. UI couldn't lean on text.

   • Solutions had to work for a child being guided by a caregiver.

2. Communicating mindfulness to a four-year-old.

   • "Observe your thoughts without judgment" is cognitively out of reach at this age.

   • Concepts had to be grounded in body and contrast: busy vs. calm, fluttery tummy, belly breathing.

3. Building an app that actively wants to be closed.

   • The product is competing with the same dopamine economy it's trying to counteract.

   • Doom-scrolling, infinite loops, and reward-loop addictiveness had to be designed out.

4. Balancing parent oversight with child autonomy.

   • Parents need visibility and controls; children need a space that feels like theirs.

   • The interaction model had to handoff between the two without friction.

NAVIGATION BY FEELINGS:

Why a Mood-Based Navbar?

Traditional app navigation assumes the user knows what feature they want. A four-year-old who is overstimulated does not. They know how they feel.

Blabber replaces feature labels with emoji buttons, each mapped to a mood state:

Design Decisions:

• Emoji faces are the navigation. This serves pre-readers and leaves interpretation open. A child who feels "weird" can pick whichever face matches, and Blabber responds with a regulation strategy for that affective cluster.

• Empathic onboarding. When a child picks a mood, the app reads back a short validation script in the child's own framing before launching the activity. The exact phrasing matters: "It's okay to feel sad" validates the emotion before redirecting it.

• Mood drives content. Each mood routes the app to a different starting activity. The same child opening the app on two different days gets different starting recommendations.

Built Into the Daily Check-In:

The mood selection isn't a separate screen — it is the entry point, and it's logged. Every time the child checks in, the app records the mood and the activity they ended up in. The Parent Dashboard's Mood tab is built directly from that record.

A Note on the Three-Mood Scope:

The original design called for five moods (calm, hyper, upset, tired, bored). The prototype consolidates to three (happy, okay, upset) — partly to scope the build, partly because three covers the affective bands a child is most likely to self-identify without a parent translating. The remaining two states (tired, bored) get handled by separate flows: the bedtime sequence for tired, and the Marshmallow Choice → Free Play picker for bored.

Initially, this took the form of a traditional navigation bar. However, this design as well as the mobile interface of the Figma Make design, didn't consider the context of the users and their available technology (tablets, not phones) well.

SHAKE FOR BIG FEELINGS:

The Problem:

What happens when something inside the app is going wrong for the child, but they can't articulate it?

A four-year-old who's frustrated mid-game won't navigate to a settings menu to switch activities. A child whose mood has shifted (was upset, now okay; chose okay but actually wants something calmer) won't know to back out and re-check. And a child who's reached their limit and needs to put the iPad down has no graceful way to do that without an adult intervening.

The Solution:

A shake gesture triggers a full-screen modal anywhere in the app. The modal asks, in plain language: "Is something wrong?" and offers three options:

• Not [current mood]: re-route to the mood picker

• Bad Game: leave this activity, try a different one

• Never Mind: dismiss, go back

If the child shakes again — a clearer signal that something more than a misroute is happening — the modal escalates to: "Did you mean to shake your iPad again? Or do you need a break?" with two options: Keep Playing or Take a Break (which routes to the Break/Offline screen).

Why a Gesture and Not a Button:

A persistent escape button in the UI either gets pressed accidentally or stops being noticed. A shake is intentional, requires a deliberate physical action that works regardless of where the child is in the app. There's no "right place" that they have to navigate to first. This design was based on Apple's shake-to-undo pattern.

Concerns and Mitigations:

• Breaking the iPad. The most obvious risk. The audience here is realistic — parents handing tablets to four-year-olds use Otterboxes or equivalent rugged cases by default.

• Reinforcing maladaptive coping mechanisms. The child shouldn't be rewarded for throwing their iPad around.

• Range-of-motion activities. Dance and yoga involve the device being moved around. To begin these types of activities, the child is first instructed to put their iPad down.

Why It Matters:

Most kids' apps treat the child as the variable to be controlled. Blabber treats the child's emotional state as the thing to design around, and gives them a way to redirect the app when it's not meeting them where they are.

THE MARSHMALLOW CHOICE:

The Stanford Reference:

The original marshmallow experiment offered children a choice: one marshmallow now, or two if they could wait. Blabber's Continue Playing Timer is a riff on the same idea, repurposed as a screen-time intervention.

How It Works:

After a guided activity ends, the app tells the child they earned extra time and asks: Play Now 🎮, or Save Extra Time 🌙 for tomorrow?

• Play Now opens a free-play picker with a visible TimeTimer-style countdown.

• Save Extra Time triggers a praise sequence and routes the child to the offline screen, banking the remaining minutes for the next session.

Both choices are reinforced with read-along praise: "Saving time for tomorrow — what a great choice!" or "Pick an activity!" — neither option is framed as the wrong one.

Why a Choice and Not an Auto-Close:

A forced close trains the child to associate the app with frustration ("it cut me off"). A choice trains the child to negotiate with their own future self ("I want this later"). The praise sequence on Save Extra Time is intentional — it gives the harder choice a more rewarding emotional payoff than the easier one, which is the whole point of running the experiment in the first place.

Design Considerations:

• Both options are positive. Neither feels like a punishment. Saving time is framed as winning something, not losing access.

• The choice is presented in plain language and read aloud. No child should fail this prompt because they couldn't read it.

• Parent-set ceiling. The total session length is set in the Parent Dashboard's Time Limits tab. The child negotiates within that ceiling, not around it.

• The dashboard tracks both outcomes. The Mood tab on the Parent Dashboard logs whether the child chose Play More or Save Extra Time on each day, so the parent can notice patterns without making it the child's job to explain themselves.

READ-ALONG TTS:

Why Text-to-Speech Wasn't Optional:

The target audience is 4–6 years old. The lower end of that range cannot read. The upper end is still decoding sound-by-sound. Any text in the app is either inaccessible to half the audience, or slow and frustrating for the other half — unless the app reads it back.

Design Decisions Anchored Around Early Readers:

• Line lengths capped at ~20 characters or soft-returned at punctuation, clause ends, or phrase boundaries.

• Simple language, large type, generous leading.

• Buttons sized for limited dexterity, paired with emojis so the icon carries the meaning if the word doesn't.

• TTS read-along highlights words as they're spoken via a karaoke-style hook (useReadAlong) that walks an array of words at a tuned pace. Therefore, children who are starting to read get the visual-auditory pairing that supports literacy development, while pre-readers can still listen along.

The Result:

Cognitive load is low enough that the child can focus on the content of the activity (a sleep story, a check-in prompt, a meditation script) rather than on parsing the interface.

PARENT DASHBOARD:

The Two-User Problem:

Blabber has two users in a single session: the parent who launches the app, and the child who uses it. Their needs are different and sometimes in tension.

• Parents want oversight, content control, and proof their child is actually engaging.

• Children want a space that feels like theirs, without an adult hovering inside it.

The Hand-Off Model:

The Parent Dashboard sits behind a PIN gate. Once the parent unlocks it, they see a list of child profiles (the prototype ships with three: Ellie, Maya, Theo), each with a last-used mood indicator. The parent picks the child, optionally adjusts the time limit, and hands the device over. From the child's side, the experience begins with the mood picker — they never see the dashboard.

What the Dashboard Surfaces:

The dashboard is organized into five tabs:

• Profile: child name, age, photo, account settings.

• Activity: which activities the child completed this week and how long each took.

  • Useful for the parent to prompt conversation later ("I saw you drew a tree today — tell me about it").

• Mood: a calendar view of mood check-ins.

  • Each day shows the starting mood, what activity the child did, what their mood was after, and whether they chose Play More or Save Extra Time. Tapping a day opens a detail drawer with the full session breakdown.

• Time Limits: daily ceiling for app use, plus a toggle for the 5-minute warning before the limit hits.

• Content: controls for which story library, music, and activity types are available to this child.