We all need a friend! Enter… OLLEE

Parent Zone had an idea.

To create a virtual friend for children 8-11 years old to help foster meaningful conversations around complex topics by providing a simple, visual framework providing structure to discuss feeling and provide relevant advice about various day to day situations.

The increased anxiety / mental health concerns caused by the effects of COVID lockdown have increased the importance of such a digital bridge between children and their parents/teachers.
Parentzone approached Digital Marmalade to help create, develop and bring a fully inclusive, engaging Ollee to life - something we love to do.

Together with Parentzone insight, customer feedback and our creativity - Ollee was born!
From there, we needed to develop the mechanic to deliver Ollee right to those that need it, when they need it, so we agreed to develop an App (PWA).

The key focus was to help parents and children connect through asking about emotions (positive and negative) and then providing helpful advice about that specific issue. We understood the opportunity - to develop something meaningful that will help families in so many ways - and that fed into many of the decisions made during the build.

From the outset, it was evident that this needed to be a design-led process - where issues such as character colour, expressions and shape will define the project and its' long term success. To ensure the Ollee character was fit for purpose, we engaged in various focus group sessions and took direct feedback from final users.
We are very proud of Ollee, and the early signs are, so do our target audience.

The project was a very creative, agile process peppered with technology, from the CMS (which allows ParentZone to manage the content of the advice at no further cost) to the beautiful and intuitive front end that both children and parents can navigate easily.

No better way than visiting the site and "chatting" with our new friend Ollee HERE.