
Woobo's World
Woobo’s World is a game that is played through the Woobo toy, focusing on children discovering the setting, making friends, exploring their relationships, completing simple tasks, and collecting items.
Woobo's World
Woobo’s World is a game that is played through the Woobo toy, focusing on children discovering the setting, making friends, exploring their relationships, completing simple tasks, and collecting items.
My Role
UX/UI Designer
Woobo’s Game World houses the imaginary location of Woobolaya. As Woobo is an imaginary friend for kids, children should feel like they are going on a magical journey when playing and interacting with the Woobo toy. Content is categorized into themed locations within the broader world of Woobos. Kids visit characters and locations to play games rather than clicking icons. As kids visit Woobobalaya landmarks to play games, this extra layer transports kids into Woobo’s world.
Our goal is to help children grow confidently. We want the kids to explore and to try new content, but since Compassion and Companionship are two of our educational principles, our friendship should reinforce these rather than just be a way to expose kids to content.
We hope that a magical exploration game will encourage children to keep coming back to their favorite activities and building a deeper bond with their own Woobo.
OVERVIEW
THE GOAL
What is Woobo?
Woobo, designed for kids, is a smart educational robot companion with an interactive touchscreen and multiple sensors built in. Woobo plays games and tells stories that teach kids about people, places, and concepts.

Why do we want to create a Woobo's World game?
Current Woobo's touchscreen UX flow is simple but monotonous. The user clicks the icon to enter a content. So we want to design a Woobo’s World experience that is intended to give kids the opportunity to explore and connect with Woobo and its world through a multitude of fun bit sized game mechanics and learning experiences. Each task, friend, mini-game, and collectible is built around a larger meta experience that encourages children to keep coming back to their favorite activities and building a deeper bond with their own Woobo. From the business perspective, we would like to increase the stickiness of the physical product and establish a content purchasing platform on parent app for parents.
Understand the Goal
As Woobo is an imaginary friend for kids, children should feel like they are going on a magical journey when playing and interacting with the Woobo toy.We hope that a magical exploration game will engage with the children even further as kids are inquisitive and love stories.
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Increase stickiness of the toy, we assume parents only willing to pay for content if contents are good or children really loves the product.
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Incentive to play content. We want to gamify the experience so children have incentive to play more new contents or repeat same contents.
Improve content recommendation system. We need to establish a content promotion system that display limit amount of content but refresh daily so children come back to it every day.
The Woobo’s World experience is intended to give kids the opportunity to explore and connect with Woobo and his world through a multitude of fun bit sized game mechanics and learning experiences. Each task, Friend , mini-game and collectible is built around a larger meta experience that encourages children to keep coming back to their favorite activities and building a deeper bond with their own Woobo.
Our goal is to help children grow confidently. We want the kids to explore and to try new content, but since Compassion and Companionship are two of our educational principles, our friendship should reinforce these rather than just be a way to expose kids to content. Friendship should be built through different means.
From business perspective we want to establish an organic content purchase system with good user experience which incentive parents and kids to purchase content.
Woobo World is designed to be expandable - as the toy is always updated - we will add new content/games or even categories. We also want to make our platform more friendly for content partners and incorporate them as part of the game design.
RESEARCH
Our basic concept is to categorize contents into characters and themed locations within the broader world of Woobo. So we kept two questions in mind when we were doing the research and competitive analysis. "How do we build the world?" and "What the user's emotion should be and how do we maintain it throughout the user journey?" We interviewed parents, observed kid while playing devices, and also did analysis on software games, robots, and visual style to come up with insights to understand them better.
Insights
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It is beneficial for kids to manage and build their own relationships. Friendships play a pivotal role in developing self- confidence and social skills.
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Getting players is hard, but keeping them is harder. A reward system provides a way to give gamers something back for the time and effort spent in-game.
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Younger children (6 and below) will click on anything because of their innate curiosity but will get distracted and bored easily.
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Kids couldn't read. Make everything symbol based, voice over everything.
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It's not easy for young kids to perform advanced actions such as multitouch tap, swipe, double tap, pinch, etc. Limit the interaction to simple taps on clearly identifiable areas.
Based on the insights, we have some key features Woobo's World game can consider and also set our design principles that give the design direction and criteria.
Game Mechanics - Key Features

Friendship
the key to interfacing with the world and playing games

Avatar System
allows users to create their own avatar

Album
quick access to games
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Reward System
is a key to boosting loyalty and making fans stick around
Design Principles
Everything is a toy
Fun to play
Keeping everything reactive to touch
Stay relax while playing
Simple tap
interface
Less is more
Single click for complex interface
Simple but playable tappable interior
Simple but cute
visual style
Vibrant and fun
Not neon or clashing
GAME LOOP
The gameplay loop contains detail on how common usage patterns and interrelations between user activities and progress.

WIREFRAME
I made three big iterations for the wireframe based on several rounds of team discussions. During this process, we decided not to add a reward system and avatar feature for MVP. Below is the final decision.
See previous wireframes here.
FINAL DESIGN
Locations

The main world page (landmark selection scroll) has an angled isometric overhead view that user can swipe left and right in a wheel. Once clicked, user will be transitioned to each location’s interior which is a 2D frontal view displaying characters
Interior and Characters
Each location is filled with clickable terrain and characters. These characters will be the key to interfacing with the world, playing games, and gaining collectibles. Below are some of the interiors and characters.
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Sticker and Friendship

Each character shares a different content every day. After the kid plays, he will get a sticker that allows him to play that content again. The more they play together, the closer they become.

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Album

The album allows the user to learn more about the characters' hobbies and play their favorite games. This acts as a quick access to games.

