Helping children navigate treatment protocols
Walk young leukemia patients and their families through in understanding treatment protocols, using personalized storytelling and interactive learning.
Role
Product Designer
Year
2024
Duration
6 weeks
Category
Client
Challenge
Understanding treatment protocols can be emotionally tricky and physiologically taxing, especially for children and their families. Beaba sought to find a way to make the process clear, comforting, and engaging.
Solution
I led the design of a visual novel that turns treatment steps into episodes. It starts with an onboarding quiz, medical log and planner, and guides families through real, synced protocols using gentle storytelling.
Exploration
Parents described feeling paralyzed by the complexity of these diagrams, especially when trying to explain them to children. We knew our design needed to make things feel less clinical, more human.
One mother turned the protocol into a board game to make it approachable for her child. It wasn’t perfect, but it captured something essential: kids need to interact with information differently.
This became our starting point.
🍀 How might we adapt the parent’s board game into one that’s more emotionally and cognitively digestible for children? 🍀
The original version had strong potential, but needed clearer logic, a friendlier tone, and a structure that matched how kids absorb emotionally difficult information.
❤️🩹 … and how do we understand what young cancer patients go through—without putting them through more? ❤️🩹
Direct research with children in treatment is ethically sensitive, making us having to take a creative, indirect approach through interviews with people who had undergone other intense, protocol-based treatments, and review literature and clinical articles.
Design Decisions
🌱 Research Insights
Why we needed research
Early on, we realized that kids and families needed more than just information — they needed emotional support and tools that made complex protocols understandable. Two key gaps emerged:
emotional accessibility and narrative structure.
What we did to move forward ethically:
Conducted interviews with adults who had undergone high-intensity treatments
Analyzed pediatric cancer materials and educational tools
Reviewed clinical literature to align our design with real treatment protocols
What we learned
Reducing anxiety through story-driven pacing
Using kid-appropriate visuals to make information digestible
Designing tools that reflect how children absorb and remember
🧪 Game Exploration
Why we didn’t stick with games like cards or quizzes
We initially explored playful formats like card games and quizzes. But we noticed a core challenge: kids were emotionally disconnected from the treatment steps in those formats.
Here’s what didn’t work:
Card/board games required rule familiarity and added mental load during a stressful time
Quizzes lacked emotional grounding and a cohesive story
Why we chose a visual novel
Embed real-life treatment protocols into a narrative flow
Use character choice and pacing to give kids a sense of safety and control
Mirror clinical timelines without adding pressure to perform or “win”
Design Process
🌍 Chapters Map
We designed the chapters map to give children a clear sense of where they are in their treatment journey, without overwhelming them. Chapters unlock only when they align with the child’s real-life medical timeline. This mirrors how treatment unfolds in stages. It helps families focus only on what’s needed today.
🖍️ Coloring Book
Processing emotions is just as important as following steps. We added a coloring book to help kids slow down and reflect after engaging with harder content. After some of the more serious medical chapters, kids needed a moment to slow down. The coloring book became that pause. It gave them space to process, reflect, and stay engaged on their own terms.
📖 Visual Novel Interface
We ultimately chose a visual novel format over card or board games because it best addressed two key needs: emotional safety and narrative-based clarity. Through stories and choices, children can understand treatment steps in ways that feel supportive and empowering.
🧑⚕️ Onboarding Quiz
Every child’s treatment journey is different. We built the onboarding quiz to tailor the experience to each child’s specific protocol, comfort level, and whether they are engaging solo or with a parent. Families told us that starting treatment was one of the most disorienting moments—kids didn’t know what to expect, and parents didn’t always know how to explain. The onboarding quiz gives each child a version of the experience that fits their story.
💊 Medication Log
Families shared how difficult it was to remember every dose, especially when routines were already disrupted by treatment. We wanted to help without adding another task to their day. Rather than creating a separate clinical tool, we integrated the log into the daily flow of the child’s journey.
Final Design
