Elin Wahlqvist

This review has been in the works for a while. A part of me is an app to help children aged 8-12 deal with the grief of someone about to die or someone who has died. It is absolutely beautiful and has been a pleasure to experience.

Apart of me Application,

Disclaimer: I am in no means a mental health expert, nor am I a child or currently dealing with the loss of someone close to me.

Apart of me is something I wish I had when dealing with the loss of a loved one and teaches skills I hope to bring with me the next time I experience loss. Going through the application reminded me of dealing with grief. They managed to highlight all the emotions that are or can be felt as someone you love is dying. It is a beautiful thing to see how they connected the various aspects of grief in this application.

This review is less of a critique and more of an appreciation for creating design that helps people. The largest critique I have is;

1. There should be a version made for adults.

2. This should be translated into more languages, to give more children the opportunity to use this application.

What i love about the application

The three main aspects I like are the relatability, making it fun and explorative, and connecting to the real world.

Relatability

I admire how Apart of me, emphasizes the relatability. Normalizing loss and understanding how loss becomes part of life. They mention Love and Loss as interconnected, highlighting how loss exists because of love.

Everyone on the island is experiencing loss

Everyone on the island has experienced loss. You can also go to the cave and hear some of the stories from people who are talking about the love they had for someone they lost.

Emotions of Loss

Apart of Me addresses the multitude of emotions that exist when dealing with loss. To explore the emotions, you catch fireflies, each with a different emotion tied to it. For example, anger is shown below. Each emotion has a color associated with it, highlighting the emotion they are talking about.

Two things I would improve are
1. There could be other indicators of the emotion discussed, for example, more facial expressions on the character or additional text.
2. Having a way to listen to the text as well.

Fun

Apart of me is an open world exploratory game, embracing elements of play and making the process more fun.

Open World & Free Play

There are no set rules or guidelines to follow in this game instead, it is up to you where you want to go, what part of the world you want to explore. This allows children to embrace elements of free play.

Levels after exploring application

After using the application for a while, you increase your level and work towards becoming a guide

Becoming a guide after using the application is quite beautiful. After learning about loss, you can help guide others. At the same time, the indication of progression can act as a motivating factor for the overall gaming experience.

Explorative

The game is explorative, you can follow a map, find stones and items that help you explore the world in a different way. This adds a level of curiosity to the game.

Connect to the Real world

As nice as it is to have an application that helps understand and give tools to deal with loss, those tools must be translated into the real world. This is something Apart of Me does very well. Through practice of dealing with emotions and calming down, as well as giving missions for children to do in the real world, and connecting users to resources that exist in the real world.

This application is useful in many ways, and I hope we can see more useful resources like this applied to a broader range of target users.

This design review is still in progress and will be updated soon.

Thank you for following along and if you have any questions feel free to reach out.