Buio is a game to help kids to tackle their fear of the dark. Despite each of us once has been a kid himself, empathise with them is one of the hardest goals you can achieve. They have a peculiar perception of things, they cannot read, they need guidance and their attention its hard to get and easy to lose. Design for them has been a pretty big challenge. These are the process and tools that helped us to define the best experience we could deliver to one of the most delicate categories of users.

We started by defining an area of research, someway to enter the world of children (that at this point we set as 3-5 y.o.) from a critic point of view. In our case, this entrance has been fears as frustrating experiences every human beings encounter in its life.

First things first: we had to understand for real the people we were addressing to. So we started with some tools to begin our user research:

• - Interviewed kids with games and activities
• - Asked for parents perception of the problem
• - Gather quantitative data with a survey

The semi-structured interview has been the perfect tool to get a little bit closer to kids' mindset. From the survey, we discovered that the most common fear is the one of the dark and which are the most adopted solutions. Talking with parents we understood that this is a trauma for children as well as a problem for parents themselves. We couldn't avoid to consider them as secondary users, and we understood that when you deal with extreme users, the point of view of people that are more near to them, is very important to be effective. All this informations helped us to transform our target into "personas" to remember who we were designing for.

With the fear of the dark in our mind we went deep for a better understanding of the problem we were facing, searching qualitative information from reliable channels:

• - consulting a childhood psychologist
• - read scientific papers and other desktop research
• - benchmarking products to understand which approaches have been used

The most valuable moment has been the discussion with the doctor. Talk with someone that has a lot of experience and expertise is a bucket full of insights and can really boost your comprehension of the topic you are investigating. Overall, we discovered that against fears, having a tool to make the problem disappear is not a succesful behaviour. Adding friction and hostility is only reinforcing the idea that the problem has to be a problem. Face it and the act of embrace the fear itself in acceptance is instead the best way to reduce its impact and help it fade out over time.

The time has come, to translate our insights and start developing our project.

Our answer was to make it fun! That's when Buio has born, a game which needs a dark environment to be played so that kids wants to put themselves into darkness and get comfortable with the environment.

At this point is easy to rush in. Instead, the best start is to have a good plan. We designed the skeleton of our product, always related to the information we collected from the users, to match as much as possible their needs and expectations. This also helps the team to have a common path to follow, to make decisions and set boundaries at the beginning, instead of arguing later. Then if all the team will agree on breaking some of these boundaries, it's probably for the best, they don't need to be fixed walls. A cohesive group strive for consistency!

Of course, develop means to get your hands dirty and make stuff, but this doesn't mean to stop research. We never settled in searching valuable references and document about good products for kids (as a designer you should be able to steal like an artist). While designing for extreme users, is hard to follow the right path and very easy to lose the connection with your user needs. It's a good practice, if possible, to go along with them step by step. Developing content for the game, we kept asking kids what they thought about the elements we were developing and iterated as many times as possible before we had a full product to test.

This is where magic happens. Put your product in the very hands of the user, and observe. Then it's a roller-coaster: parts of your project get smashed by the reality that they are not even understandable, some achieve to amaze the user way more than you could imagine, and trust me, it's very hard to foresee which are going to belong to a group or the other. Anyway, at the end of the day, the problems arisen are the ones you have to be searching for because are the ones that can transform your product to something better. But keeping the good ones with you will provide so much energy to keep doing your best. These, in particular, are some of the things we learned about kids with our testing:

Some say "Done is better than perfect". After a couple of tests and iterations of the full product, it was time to deliver the project. Buio is a game that teaches kids to enjoy darkness through narrative and a very simple yet fun interaction. Buio takes advantage of the physical controller to transform the environment and push the kid into exploration so that it gets comfortable with its bedroom in the dark. We kept off text and reduced icons as much as possible to keep the Interface free from the complexity of the adult's symbolism, in favour of natural hints for interaction. The challenge of the game is to transform "scary" shadow monsters into common objects of the house, by following the movements of the virtual egg with the real controller. The main character Buio conveys a wide set of emotions and reactions to create a friendly bond with the kid and guide the experience.

• 1) Extreme users are a huge challenge because it is hard to empathise with them.
• 2) Extreme users are usually part of common environments, their context is a good gateway to reach them at the end.
• 3) It needs experience to understand an extreme user, take advantage of who spent a lot of time with them.
• 4) Be sure to set the right goal, don't waste time and effort.
• 5) Start by making a good plan and make sure everyone agrees, lose sight is easy.
• 6) It's nearly impossible to make assumptions about an extreme user, evaluate each step with them.
• 7) Testing is not an option, even if is harsh, it is the only way for validation.
• 8) Done is better than perfect, deliver!
• 9) Respect diversity, be open-minded, have fun!

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