Replacing fear with fun for sick kids
The Starlight Foundation
The Starlight Foundation’s presence in hospitals keeps sick kids smiling.
The pandemic revealed opportunities to connect kids with the magic of Starlight regardless of location or time of day, and solidified focus on expanding Starlight’s reach beyond their mostly on-the-ground presence in major paediatric hospitals.
Our brief: in 8 weeks, design, develop, and release a safe online platform to bring the magic of Captain Starlight to kids, no matter where they are.
Approach
I was the designer within a three person team (alongside a product manager and developer) creating a platform tailored to the paediatric care experience that enabled 2-way interaction between kids and Captain Starlight - Starlight’s league of ‘chaotic superheroes from outer-space’.
Adapting the Captain’s improvisational play approach to the digital world was underpinned by ensuring the connection between child and Captain could remain personalised, adaptable and collaborative. The core of the platform is a streaming service where Captain Starlights deliver multiple live shows a day. Children can interact with Captains through private chat and real-time reactions.
The experience was considered holistically, beyond just the digital format, with children being encouraged to also spend time off-screen, with prompts around crafts, games and activities, that could then be submitted and worked into the next livestream by the Captains.
Working closely alongside the Starlight Foundation, two rounds of user testing were undertaken with children in the Adelaide Women’s and Children’s Hospital and the Sydney Children’s Hospital. A further testing round worked with staff and performers producing the livesteam and managing back-end production.
Highlights
Adapting user-testing for children
Product testing had to be adapted to work with kids as young as 4. Sessions couldn’t go for longer than 10 minutes and any questions had to be simplified to a ‘was that bad, ok, great?’ scale. Observation and well organised testing templates got us a lot of insights.
One insight highlighted the sense of agency kids got from seeing their inputs and interactions celebrated and recognised by the Captains, such as a name shout out, or an idea suggestion built-upon. We were able to emphasise this in the digital context through things such as personalised reaction emojis.
Improvisational performers need input
The Captains are highly skilled in ‘improvisational play’. They take kids inputs, ideas and personalities and build on them. In the digital context they could no longer see their audience or know as much about their context.
We were able to leverage an short onboarding flow as well as available device and browser data to support performers with snippets of information help tailor interactions with an audience they could no longer see.
Impact
Planet Starlight has scaled to over 30 participating hospitals in Australia with more being added on a regular basis. During this time three or more live shows are run daily, 6 days a week, while the live chat is staffed every day. Over 37,000 chat messages have been recorded, plus over 237,000 reactions sent during a livestream. An average of nearly 7,000 unique visitors are accessing Planet Starlight each month.
Planet Starlight improves health outcomes by transporting children in hospital beds, waiting rooms, or isolating at home to a place filled with fun, distraction and laughter where they can feel a sense of agency, community, and simple child-like silliness.
“Planet Starlight has given rural children access to much needed distraction and child-friendly play in a bland, yucky, boring, hospital setting. It’s changing the way rural children can access services that are available to children in major children’s hospitals.
I used a live show as I removed an IVC. The mother loved it and the kid was awesomely distracted.”
— Paediatric Clinical Nurse, Port Macquarie Base Hospital